Upgrading to Java 9

Ever since Java 9 was released last fall, I have been wanting to upgrade our software at work to the new platform. I am not interested in the new module stuff, mostly I just want the convenience methods like List.of(), and the platform improvements. I think G1 by default looks good, the new representation for strings to save memory looks like a huge win, and all the performance numbers that I have seen show it to be a big win. Unfortunately this is not as straight forward as one should hope.

I hit a bug in Idea 2016.1.2 that I wanted to share in case anyone else is hitting the same issue. I was trying to stand up a new Spring Boot project last week and when I what try to launch the app through the IDE the embedded tomcat server would throw an exception. org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start embedded container; nested exception is org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start EmbeddedWebApplicationContext due to missing EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:133) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:532) ~[spring-context-4.2.6.RELEASE.jar:4.2.6.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.refresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:118) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refresh(SpringApplication.java:766) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.createAndRefreshContext(SpringApplication.java:361) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:307) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1191) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1180) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at com.chooseenergy.auth.AuthApplication.main(AuthApplication.java:14) [classes/:na]Caused by: org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start EmbeddedWebApplicationContext due to missing EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.getEmbeddedServletContainerFactory(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:185) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.createEmbeddedServletContainer(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:158) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:130) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] ... 8 common frames omitted

This is sort of old news now, but I haven’t had a chance to weigh in yet so I figured I would type my thoughts up anyway. On September 3rd Jetbrains announced a new licensing model. As you can imagine people immediately went crazy on twitter and 15 years of developer goodwill went up in smoke. What is the issue with the new model, the biggest problem with it is that they are moving from a perpetual model where you own that version of the IDE to a rental model ala Adobe where if you stop paying your tools stop working. Even more infuriating they came out like this was doing a favor for their developers and making it cheaper. In reality it only really makes it cheaper if you are say a consulting shop that is often switching between say pycharm, webstorm and idea. Then you can save some money over the cost of 3 perpetual licenses. For pretty much everyone else it is much worse.