Hey guys, I would like to initiate (or better to say, resume) the discussion regarding CXF 3.5.x and beyond. The 3.5.x has been in the making for quite a while but has not seen any releases yet. As far as I know, we have only pending upgrade to Apache Karaf 4.3.3 (on SNAPSHOT now) so be ready to meet JDK 17 LTS next month. I think this is a good opportunity to release 3.5.0 but certainly looking for ideas and opinions here. Importantly, I think for 3.5.x the JDK-8 should be supported as the minimal required JDK version (just an opinion since JDK-8 is still very widely used).
On the other side, many libraries (Jetty, wss4j, ...) are bumping the baseline to JDK-11. The work @Colm is doing to update to OpenSaml 4.x [1] is a good argument to have the JDK-11+ release line. Should we have a dedicated 3.6.x or 4.x.x branch(es) for that? Last but not least, Jakarta 9.0+ support. Last year we briefly talked about it [2], at this moment it looks like having dedicated release line (4.x/5.x) with Jakarta artifacts is beneficial in long term. Large chunk [3] of work has been already done in this direction. The Spring 6 milestones with Jakarta support are expected to land in Q4/2021 [4] but I am not sure what plans Apache Karaf team has, @Freeman do you have any insights? To summarize briefly: - release 3.5.0 in preparation to JDK-17 LTS, keeping JDK-8 as baseline - move master to 3.6.x (4.x?) with JDK-11 as the minimal required JDK version (Jetty 10, ...) - branch off 5.x (4.x?) to continue the work on supporting Jakarta 9.0+, with JDK-11 as the minimal required JDK version (Jetty 11, ...) I think it is very clear that maintaining JavaEE + JDK8 / JavaEE + JDK11 / Jakarta + JDK11 would consume much more time from the team, but I am not sure we have other options if we aim to evolve and keep CXF up to date. Any thought, ideas, comments, suggestions guys? Thank you! [1] https://github.com/apache/cxf/tree/opensaml4 [2] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/cxf-dev/202012.mbox/%3c1503263798.20201226124...@gmail.com%3E [3] https://github.com/apache/cxf/pull/737 [4] https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/issues/25354#issuecomment-875915960 Best Regards, Andriy Redko
