Is there any reason not to use Java 11 with Bloomreach 14?

Can anyone on the Bloomreach development team please speak to why Java 11 LTS is not compatible with Bloomreach 14.x?

I have read differing perspectives on whether or not Java 11 is compatible and would like the authoritative response.

Context: My development is performing an upgrade from 13.x and in order to leverage some common capabilities of our enterprise platform team it is required that our deployment run on Java 11 (without some serious custom work).

We have successfully compiled and run Bloomreach 14.x with Java 11 and can access the /cms module without a problem. Unfortunately we are unable to access the /site module, but we do not think this is related to a Java 8|11 discrepancy because we have already pulled in the dependencies that Java no longer provides in 11 (java.xml.bind, etc.)

5 Likes

There is no specific reason to avoid Java 11, but supporting it fully requires a careful audit of the full set of transitive dependencies in the product. There are some libraries with different Maven coordinates for artifacts supporting Java 11 and above, so setting up a build that supports both 8 and 11 is complex.

For now, we’ve chosen to delay a disruptive major-version upgrade and continue to make feature releases with our 14.x Java 8 codebase.

Your feedback is an important signal for when we should release Java 11 support. If you are an enterprise customer, it would help us if you could communicate this via your account manager or by filing a support portal ticket, so that we can follow-up with you.

Looking at the roadmap Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap
I would skip Java 11 and would try to aim for 17 (next month will be the next version 17 = LTS marking 11 for only 2 years left for support by Oracle)

We’re unfortunately bound to 11 by our common platform. FWIW we’re using OpenJDK and can expect support to 2024 IIRC