Ford has an internal “shared farm” of servers that our applications can use. The shared farm is Websphere Application Server 8.0.0.x. This only has Java6 available. While some teams go out and spend the money to procure their own servers outside of the shared farm, this is prohibitively expensive without a powerful use case.
Our Java applications won't have a server offering in our internal shared farm for Java 7 until 4Q2016 or 1Q2017 at the earliest. We plan on developing almost all applications against Java6 until that time, and unfortunately we have to re-evaluate continuing to use at an enterprise level any open source software that no longer patches and supports Java6 due to the risk it introduces to our applications. We understand that this makes us an outlier in the community of DeltaSpike users. Thanks, ~john From: John D. Ament [mailto:johndam...@apache.org] Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2016 7:13 AM To: dev@deltaspike.apache.org; marvint...@gtcgroup.com Cc: Rooda, William (John.); Shvartsman, Oleg (O.I.); Hall, Todd (T.B.) Subject: Re: Cutting over to Java 7 Hi Marvin, Thanks for the input. You can find our discussion/vote thread from last month here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/deltaspike-dev/201603.mbox/%3CCAOqetn_vo69sx-yQjLt%3DQpfdRXgXVqu7NiobanLgXKOOr6Co0Q%40mail.gmail.com%3E The curious thing about your note - the WebSphere version I've seen the Ford team mention a few times requires Java 7. In general, EE 7 systems were built for Java 7 support (JMS made use of autocloseable is one I can think of off the top of my head). As mentioned, there's still a plan to support the 1.6.x line. If you guys find any issues that you need to stay on 1.6.x, please feel free to raise them and we can address as additional 1.6.x patches. John On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 6:42 AM Marvin Toll <marvint...@gtcgroup.com<mailto:marvint...@gtcgroup.com>> wrote: A data point: Ford Motor Company is on Java 6. Given our portfolio of 4,000 applications (a subset of which are Java) - it is difficult to know how long a migration to Java 7 will take. It was scheduled to begin in calendar year 2016 - the current "begin" target is 2017. _Marvin -----Original Message----- From: John D. Ament [mailto:johndam...@apache.org<mailto:johndam...@apache.org>] Sent: Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:14 PM To: deltaspike <dev@deltaspike.apache.org<mailto:dev@deltaspike.apache.org>> Subject: Cutting over to Java 7 All, I wanted to get opinions for how to cut over to Java 7. There's two ways I've done similar cut overs in the past, wanted to share them and build out some ideas. 1. Continue maintenance on 1.6 for x months. When we decide that we're going to cut a 1.7 we do the switch then. 2. Decide now that the next release is going to be planned as 1.7. If we need to do maintenance on 1.6 we branch from the tag and merge back in when done. The former is safer, but will take longer. The last minor release had the most patch releases on it, 4. The latter is more practical and shows implementation much quicker. It creates a bit more overhead as we'd need to merge branches. In the 4.5 years of deltaspike, we haven't had to do it thus yet. I suspect that given our user base, #2 would be acceptable since most everyone's using Java 7+, so it seems a small chance that we'd run into a JVM difference. I'm not sure if others have different ideas to throw out. John
