For those wondering: Java 9 changed some fundamental things and is not necessarily drop-in compatible with Java 8, making migration from 8 to 9 (or above) something that can take some real effort. There were always potential issues going between Java versions but the 8 to 9 transition is especially painful.
After 9 they also went to a 6 month release cadence, but most of those releases are only supported for 6 months. But about every 3 years there's a long term support (LTS) release that's supported for years. Version 11 was the first of those, 17 (this fall) will be the next. Not really important on z/OS in particular, but in 2019 Oracle also changed it's licensing such that the Oracle Java no longer free for commercial use. Those using Java commercially can continue to use OpenJDK (the reference implementation) or one of the other free alternatives though. In short "they" made a mess of Java after 8. There's reasons for it and there's some good things in Java 9+, but... things are definitely different. Now why it's taken IBM >2 years to support Java 11, I don't know. One guess might be that they haven't put much effort into it because there's not a lot of demand for it as long as 8 is viable and getting people to migrate to 11 from 8 may be non-trivial. (How many sites are still using old COBOL compilers despite better more modern alternatives being available?) At this point OpenJDK shows Java 8 being supported until "at least May 2026" and Java 11 until "at least October 2024". So given that 17 is potentially coming available in September, and given that I think the migration from 11 to 17 will likely be easier than 8 to 9+, I wouldn't be surprised if they just hold off for 17. Scott Chapman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
