As odd as it sounds given how things used to work, in the new model you are generally expected to go from 8 to 11. So you're not especially behind. That said, this transition will be rougher than most because of modules.

Yes, a collegue and I have both taken a look to the situation when version 9 was released and it's going to take some work to do the migration. But as it is I don't if we're going to 9 or directly to 11, but I think it's on the roadmap of the next version.

They switched to a different release model with major releases more often, but not all of those releases are LTS. Java 11 if the first LTS release since Java 8.

We just made it TO Java 8.

Java 8 is EOL in January for public support/security patches. Java 7 was EOL in 2015. What have you been doing for 3 years?

I could guess, because I've been at companies doing the same. Active development and support on the product, but no time for tech debt.

Java 9 and up I understand people getting frustrated with a more frequent LTS release and these weird microreleases every year.

Red Hat and AdoptOpenJDK will be supporting OpenJDK 8 for quite some time yet. Oracle's JDK and JRE will stop getting public support, yes, but OpenJDK 8 will be alive and well for many years to come.

I was not referring to that. I was referring to the matter that they weren't ready to jump TO JDK 8 when JDK 7 was EOL, nor the next year, nor the next year after that.

What did they do with security updates when they were available for the version they were on?

Questions.

Don't get me wrong, they're not the only ones ice skating uphill on this.

Sometimes it's your clients that are painfully slow to update. I know a client that (a few years ago), after a lot of issues and wasted time, we discovered that they had a Sun JVM 1.5 with some bug on String.length ! And the worse thing is that they not like the idea of update to Java 1.7

There are still plenty of systems out there on Java 7, usually due to external dependencies.

Our only java webapp is running on Java 6 or 7, JBoss EAP 6.1. Maintenance mode, no money to upgrade.

The hell? You should just be able to take your code and compile and run it on Java 8. There aren't any major comparability breaks. Just try switching JVMs and run all your unit/integration tests (you do have tests right?)

Java 9 is the one that breaks nearly everything. We attempted Java 9 at our last shop and almost every dependency we used had some exception from a removed deprecated function down there in the stack.

We're already on java 8, the migration was done before I arrived, so I don't know how it went. But we've already taken a look at the java 9 migration and there's a lot of thing to fix. And we'll also have to remove the last java applets from the website...

Java8 changes the order hash maps return keys in. Those were never supposed to be stable, but because they were in practice, you're app may think they are.

You won't be for a long time either because the introduction of modules and the removal of the Unsafe class broke a lot of frameworks apparently.

Unsafe wasn't removed, just a few methods on it.

We are migrating from Java 8 to Typescript. Yeah a rewrite.

What does your product do that you consider Typescript as a replacement for Java?