Thursday 6 September 2018

From Java 8 to Java 11

Moving from Java 8 to Java 11 is trickier than most upgrades. Here are a few of my notes on the process.

(And here are a couple of other blogs - Benjamin Winterberg and Leonardo Zanivan.)

Modules

Java 9 introduced one of the largest changes in the history of Java - modules. Much has been said on the topic, by me and others. A key point is sometimes forgotten however:

You do not have to modularise your code to upgrade to Java 11.

In most cases, code running on the classpath will continue to run on Java 9 and later where modules are completely ignored. This is terrible for library authors, but great for application developers.

So my advice is to ignore modules as much as you can when upgrading to Java 11. Turning your application into Java modules may be a useful thing to consider in a few years time when open source dependencies really start to adopt modules. Right now, attempting to modularise is just painful as few dependencies are modules.

(The main reason I've found to modularise your application is to be able to use jlink to shrink the size of the JDK. But in my opinion, you don't need to fully modularise to do this - just create a single jar-with-dependencies with a simple no-requires no-exports module-info.)

Deleted parts of the JDK

Some parts of the JDK have been removed. These were parts of Java EE and Corba that no longer fitted well with the JDK, or could be maintained elsewhere.

If you use Corba then there is little anyone can do to help you. However, if you use the Java EE modules then the fix for the deleted code should be simple in most cases. Just add the appropriate Maven jars.

On the Java client side, things are more tricky with the removal of Java WebStart. Consider using Getdown or Update4J instead.

Unsafe and friends

Sun and Oracle have been telling developers for years not to use sun.misc.Unsafe and other sharp-edge JDK APIs. For a long time, Java 9 was to be the release where those classes disappeared. But this never actually happened.

What you might get with Java 11 however is a warning. This warning will only be printed once, on first access to the restricted API. It is a useful reminder that your code, or a dependency, is doing something "naughty" and will need to be fixed at some point.

What you will also find is that Java 11 has a number of new APIs specifically designed to avoid the need to use Unsafe and friends. Make it a priority to investigate those new APIs if you are using an "illegal" API. For example, Base64, MethodHandles.privateLookupIn, MethodHandles.Lookup.defineClass, StackWalker and Variable Handles.

Tooling and Libraries

Modules and the new six-monthly release cycle have conspired to have a real impact on the tooling and libraries developers use. Some projects have been able to keep up. Some have struggled. Some have failed.

When upgrading to Java 11, a key task is to update all your dependencies to the latest version. If there hasn't been a release in since Java 9 came out, then that dependency may need extra care or testing. Make sure you've updated your IDE too.

But it is not just application dependencies that need updating, so does Maven (and Gradle too, but I don't know much about Gradle myself). Most Maven plugins have changed major versions to a v3.x, and upgrading Maven itself to v3.5.4 is also beneficial.

Sadly, the core maven team is very small, so there are still some bugs/issues to be solved. However, if your Maven build is sensible and simple enough, you should generally be OK. But do note that upgrading a plugin from a v2.x to a v3.x may involve changes to configuration beyond that just associated with modules. For example, the Maven Javadoc plugin has renamed the argLine property.

A key point to note is the way Maven operates with modules. When the Maven compiler or surefire plugin finds a jar file that is modular (ie. with a module-info.class) it can place that jar on the modulepath instead of the classpath. As such, even though you might intend to run the application fully on the classpath, Maven might compile and test the code partly on the classpath and partly on the modulepath. At present, there is nothing that can be done about this.

Sometimes your build will need some larger changes. For example, you will need to change Findbugs to SpotBugs. And change Cobertura to JaCoCo.

If yo use Web Start, there is an open source alternative - OpenWebStart.

These build changes may take some time - they did for me. But the information available by a simple web search is increasing all the time.

Summary

I've upgraded a number of Joda/ThreeTen projects to support Java 9 or later now. It was very painful. But that is because as a library author I have to produce a jar file with module-info that builds and runs on Java 8, 9, 10 and 11. (In fact some of my jar files run on Java 6 and 7 too!)

Having done these migrations, my conclusion is that the pain is primarily in maintaining compatibility with Java 8. Moving an application to Java 11 should be simpler, because there is no need to stay tied to Java 8.

Comments welcome, but note that most "how to" questions should be on Stack Overflow, not here!

13 comments:

  1. May I predict that in few versions, maybe the 15th, 16th or 17th, the modularisation feature will be removed because it won't have been a success ?

    Modularisation goals Oracle wants us to follow has many things, for me, of a phantom requirement. Yes on the paper, it could be nice. But in the facts, where does this lead us ?

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    1. agree! I also doubt the meaning of modularisation

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  2. It's more than just nice, it's fantastic!

    1. Preventing two modules on the module path interfering with each other's packages is massive for stopping classpath and "jar hell". Maven helps, but I would still run into issues where some third party developer has decided to bundle dependencies into their own jar, or when an artifact gets renamed so maven doesn't know that it'll conflict with an older version brought in by a different dependency.

    2. Non-interference also improves cohesion: look at the completely unrelated annotations that different jars have put in the javax.annotation package. It is a mess. The fact that they are annotations is not a good reason for them to belong together, any more than all enums should go in one package. With the module system, the different jars would have to provide different packages, and so would have enforced better design in the first place.

    3. Improved encapsulation. When I put "private" on a field, what I mean is I don't want it accessed without going through my code. Maybe my code has to do something when the value changes. I put it there on purpose. And yet, every framework out there thinks it's helpful to run roughshod over access modifiers with setAccessible(). The whole point of an object-oriented language is it allows me to put data and behaviour together and encapsulate them in objects. The module system puts me back in control: writing true POJOs (plain-old java objects) that are treated as plain, rather than dusted with annotations and bytecode generated proxies and aspects -- which is what a lot of frameworks seem to think is a "POJO". This of course means I can't use some frameworks out-of-the-box, at least without explicitly granting them access with the "opens" keyword. Fine, I prefer to opt in to their excesses by choice, rather than by default. But even better, I just get them to use my public accessors and if I can't I consider dropping the framework.

    I can't overstate how liberating it is to get back to clean OO techniques, to construct our own objects with our own factories, and decide what is public and what is private and know it is enforced. Compare this to the approach Hibernate leads you to. It owns and constructs your domain objects with a default constructor. So you lose the factory pattern, lose immutability, lose encapsulation. These are enormous sacrifices in OO! And yet we just accept it's that it's supposed to be that way?

    I admit, we had to be ruthless to get to this approach, and maybe its not for software houses that are heavily invested in older stacks. But I don't want to go back to hell, just because not everybody can go forward. It's all down to the open source efforts on the open-sourced Enterprise Edition. If they can embrace the module system, then the whole ecosystem will leap forward with it. If not, then it'll be the preserve of us lucky few.

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    1. P.S. This was meant to be in reply to the Anonymous comment 20 September 2018 at 09:15
      -- apologies I clicked the wrong link :)

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    2. setAccessible will generate a warning in Java 9 and Java 11

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  3. Thanks for this -- it is incredibly helpful. Can you perhaps point to more information/details about how to "just create a single jar-with-dependencies with a simple no-requires no-exports module-info" and use jlink on it (perhaps even with the maven-jlink-plugin)?

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    1. I've not seen an actual write up, but it is pretty much as described. Use maven to create a jar file that contains all the dependencies (search jar-with-dependencies). Make sure that jar file contains a module-info.class. The module-info.java only has a module name and services, no requires or exports clauses. Then use jlink to build a distribution.

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  4. Thanks for writing the article. I am also trying to migrate my project to Java 11 from Java 8. One of the dependencies I am using in my project is using com.su.tools dependency which is no longer allowed in Java 11. I tried using exclude command in my pom.xml but the compile error persists. "Could not find artifact com.sun:tools:jar:1.8 at specified path C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-11.0.1/../lib/tools.jar"
    Can you please help me how to handle such issues ?

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  5. A reference project implementation using Java Modules and JAX-RS is available at https://github.com/mrin9/Modular-Java-Jersey-Vue

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  6. you always speak the point. nice and crisp :)

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  7. Looks at steaming mountain (several million lines) of original Java 1.3 level code that's over the years been updated with code compatible with every language version up to and including Java8 and in part still needs to be compiled against 1.3.
    And of course contains RMI-IIOP, ActiveMQ, EJB2.0, JAXB, JTA, etc. etc.

    Starts to despair.

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  8. We're researching a massive conversion of Java 8 systems to 11. This has been very helpful and a guide to other sources. At least planned greenfields won't be so much a problem - just learning Java 11 as a new source toolbox.

    Thanks.

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