Using Walkmod to migrate from Java7 to Java8

[Federico Tomassetti]

Hi,

have everyone used Walkmod to migrate code from Java7 to Java8?
There are small imcompatibilities (points where Java7 was ambiguos and Java8 does not accept it) or problems with default method in interfaces.

I am looking for a tool / to write a tool to fix these incompatibilities (_HUGE_ codebase in front of me).

Any experience/suggestions with that?

Federico

[walkmod]

Hi Federico,

Walkmod is specially useful when you need to update a lot of souce files. Walkmod has support for Java 8 and allows to create extensions by means of plugins. There are a lot of documentation about how to create a plugin and also there is a maven archetype for this purpose. We invite you to create a plugin to migrate from Java 7->Java8 to our community. However, if you were looking for a custom solution contact our professional services through the website.

[Federico Tomassetti]

HI,

thank you for the answer. I am not looking for professional services, and I would be happy to share any results I come up with.

I was wondering if anyone has attempted to do something similar with walkmod and what kind of information walkmod provides: does it produce just the AST or does it also solve references?

Thank you,

Federico

[walkmod]

Hi Federico,

Nobody is currently working in this kind of transformation (java 7 -> Java 8). However, we have realized during this year, that this is an interesting transformation, but from our point of view there are a lot of challenges because, for example, it is complex to determine when any loop is filtering elements of a given collection and hence, it is transformable with a predicate / lambda expression.

We have a public library for Java compiler utilities (symbol table, semantic analysis..). The URL is https://github.com/rpau/javalang-compiler and it is published in the public Maven repository. Also, for load the user classpath (from the pom.xml) and perform the semantic analysis you have the https://github.com/rpau/walkmod-maven-plugin