JDK 9 Outreach (DRAFT)

Introduction

With JDK 9 development underway in the OpenJDK Community, and based on our experiences with open source projects testing against JDK 9 Early Access builds in the Quality Outreach effort, it seems like a good idea to compile the accumulated wisdom to make it easier for new projects to start testing against JDK 9.

Caveat Lector

JDK 9 has not been released yet. That means the tips and suggestions accumulated here should not be taken as the final word on how to adjust your code for JDK 9 as some things may (and probably will) change as the set of JEPs targeted for JDK 9 changes. If in doubt, ask - preferably on the adoption-discuss mailing list.

The Little Things

Before you get started testing your code against JDK 9, there are a few little things to consider.

JDK 9 Early Access Builds

You can build JDK 9 yourself by following the build instructions to build the OpenJDK source code in the jdk9/jdk9 forest. Please check the list of supported build platforms to verify that your build platform is supported before you attempt building JDK 9 from source yourself.

JDK 9 Early Access builds might also be provided by third parties. Oracle publishes regular JDK 9 builds at http://jdk9.java.net, for example.

Unrecognized VM options

If your application's startup script launches the JDK 9 JVM with an unrecognized VM option, it will exit and let you know that it couldn't create a VM because of that unrecognized VM option. Some of the VM flags that were deprecated in JDK 8, have been removed in JDK 9 - like those relating to the permanent generation, which was removed in JDK 8.

Run jdeps on your code

In JDK8 a new Java Dependency Analysis Tool (jdeps) was added to help developers understand the static dependencies of their applications and libraries. It can help you find dependencies on any internal, unsupported or private APIs that your application or its libraries use. A program using such APIs is not guaranteed to work in future versions of JDK 9 or even the same platform. For more information, please see this document.

A jdeps plugin for Apache Maven exists.

Testing Your Code

In general, it's simpler to start by building your code in your familiar build environment, and test it by running it on JDK 9, than to start by building it on JDK 9. The tools and libraries used in your build process might themselves not yet have been tested with JDK 9 by their developers.

Running on JDK 9

Some of the changes targeted for JDK 9 might affect code that relies on deprecated, removed, unsupported, internal or unspecified functionality. The list below has been compiled from the list of JEPs targeted for JDK 9 and other resources. It is not an exhaustive list of changes - there may be other changes you run into that have not been listed here.

Where available, the list provides links to further resources, like JEPs, mailing list threads

Unified JVM Logging

This JEP might change log message formats and possibly the meaning of some JVM options.