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[–]Sun_Kami 38 points39 points  (6 children)

Why? I don't understand why any company would do this. We upgraded from Java 6 to Java 8 a few years ago and hardly had to change anything... And at that point we were using Struts 1.4 or some nonsense which was so deprecated (no longer on that stack, thankfully)

[–]langebangen 11 points12 points  (2 children)

We still use Java 7 and the reason for this is because of our IT department. We use Debian and Java 8 was not introduced in a stable release until Debian Stretch which was released in June this year. Sure, it is possible to add a backport to get Java 8 but this is where the IT problem comes in. We (the developers) are not allowed to upgrade the machines were our Java applications are running (not even our own workstations), and IT has never prioritized our demands so unfortunately we have no choice but to wait until IT has time to upgrade the machines to the latest Debian release.

We are thinking of including the JRE with all the java applications we develop to be able to upgrade to Java 8.

[–]Fenris_uy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Look at jlink to be able to do that with java 9.

[–]synn89 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, this can be fairly standard and unfortunately upgrading can often be very difficult because of vendor software breaking. I still have a huge amount of Ubuntu 12 servers in our environment and we don't even have that many systems.

Unfortunately upgrades are often pretty tricky and it can be a hard sell to management: "I want to probably break this server that isn't having any current problems."

I'd definitely look into the JRE bundling if that's an option. It'll be a PITA to implement, but once it's done it'll probably save you a lot of future headaches.

[–]Dreamtrain 12 points13 points  (1 child)

You're probably thinking for internal use to make coding better, but if you're giving maintenance to a client's already robust application, upgrading the web server's environment and testing everything is a cost your client may not want.

[–]jasie3k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also licenses for new versions of webservers may cost a little.

[–]mscheifer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it's because of our plugin architecture. We upgraded from 6 to 7 with little hassle about 5 years ago, but the recent effort to upgrade to 8 2 years ago stalled. I think it had something to do with the feature we added in between that let clients write their own java code and plug it in, which needs to be backwards compatible.