Oracle changed their support roadmap for the Oracle Java SE products. Starting September 2017, Oracle has moved to a "Long Term Support" (LTS) model for Oracle Java SE products. This means that LTS versions will be targeted for release every three years. In addition, feature (major) releases will be targeted for every six months along with quarterly maintenance/security updates. This means the support roadmap will follow the following pattern:

^{Note that the length of public updates for the LTS releases including 11 is to be announced later.}

Impact on Blueriq Java Runtime

This change in support from Oracle needs to be adapted by Blueriq. Since we don't want to compile Blueriq against non-LTS versions, doing this would cause us to change the compile JDK every 6 months, we are tied to the 3 year LTS release cycle. For the non-LTS versions we aim to support them, meaning it is possible to run and create custom code/compile them on the non-LTS versions. If possible we will also try to support the next LTS version while compiling on the previous version. This way migrating to a new version of Blueriq only means changing the Blueriq version instead of a multiple platform update.

Blueriq depends heavily on the JDK for much of it's functionality. Oracle decided to deprecate several modules from the JDK in version 9 and 10 and removed them in version 11, e.g. the module java.xml.ws. These modules are needed to run Blueriq, e.g. java.xml.ws is needed for webserviceing purposes. Oracle will provide these modules via third party dependencies for each matching JDK version for version 9 and up, compiled against that JDK version. We can not add third party dependencies compiled against a higher JDK version then we compile against. This means that it will be impossible for us to compile on JDK 8 and support version 11. Since we don't want to change the compile JDK version in a minor release, because the impact for projects, specially with custom code, is enormous. The Java support roadmap for Blueriq for the following versions will be like this: