Java 9 we hardly knew ye, yet here we are and today was the GA release of Java 10. This is especially true for those of us using Spring boot as we just got official Java 9 support a couple of weeks ago and now 10 is out. From my standpoint the big features of the release are the Root Certificates. Java 9 shipped without root certificates if you used OpenJDK which in my mind makes it less useable as now you have to with that, you can’t just run it and go. That is what was keeping me on Oracle’s releases of Java. Now in Java 10 there is no difference with the oracle JDK and the OpenJDK so I will probably just deploy my apps on OpenJDK in the future. That simplifies Linux installation as now you can just run apt-get install and go. Before I used to have to add the ppa for Oracles and install it and then deal with the strong crypto policy files. All those old pain points are gone.

After upgrading my test app to Spring Boot 2.0 yesterday I decided to see how difficult the Java 9 upgrade was from there. I am happy to report that it was fairly trivial. I upgraded my maven pom to set the Java version to 9 and did a mvn clean install.

Immediately I see some no class def exceptions around javax.transaction.Transaction. I did some quick google searching and discovered the problem seems to be in the Maven Surefire plugin. I found a work around that said to set the version to 2.20.1 and added a command line flag of –add-modules javax.transaction. After doing that I was seeing errors around java.xml.bind. Doing some more searching I then added a second –add-modules java.xml.bind. This fixed the issue. In the course of doing so I found a link to the issue on apache’s website. Reading through the comments I ended up with a final configuration of 2.21.0 with the following options:

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.