Java11 and Trellis

[Aaron Coburn]

Hi All,

I wanted to give folks a heads up about plans for Java11 and Trellis. At present, all the Trellis libraries use Java8 APIs and the published JARs are all built with Java8. At the same time, the released Docker-based applications use a Java11 runtime.

Trellis has supported Java11 modularity for a long time but hasn't explicitly required Java11. Now, however, I am looking at setting the minimum required Java platform as 11. There are three principal reasons:

* Some key dependencies are moving toward requiring Java 11, JakartaEE 9 and Quarkus are two prominent examples

* There are security features that Java11 provides but which are not available on Java8 platforms, TLS 1.3 is a good example

* There are a large number of very small improvements to the Java language and core APIs that will simplify development and maintenance of the software itself

Unless there are specific concerns raised, I would like to propose that Trellis begins requiring Java11 in the September timeframe. This would likely coincide with the 0.15.x series (the current release is 0.13.1).

Best regards,

Aaron