[🚀 Feature]: Require Java 17

[titusfortner]

Feature and motivation

We talked last year about requiring Java 17 later this year, are we still on track for that?

Would it make sense to make that part of Selenium 5?

Usage example

n/a

[joerg1985]

Why not going to 21 (also LTS) instead?
Everybody who needs to upgrade it's local JVM could install 21 instead of 17, so there is no overhead for them.

[diemol]

It is just easier to convince people to do the shorter jump.

I also had in mind the requirement to have at least Java 17 in autumn, at the beginning of winter. Even if Selenium 5 does not happen.

[baflQA]

The only jump you have to convince people to, is to drop JDK 8. I would also vote for targeting the most recent LTS release.

[diemol]

https://www.selenium.dev/blog/2023/java-8-support/

Since 4.14, Java 11 is required.

[baflQA]

That's what I mean 😅 the biggest step was done.

[titusfortner]

Java 17 is EOL in September 2024
So it might make sense to jump to 21 which is how we do it for all the other languages

[titusfortner]

@diemol / @pujagani / @joerg1985
Do we know what code changes we would make if we could update to either 17 or 21?

If we don't have anything specific, it might make more sense to update more slowly. For Java 11 we had a specific need for the http client.

[pujagani]

+1 to Titus and Diego's thought process. I don't know anything pressing that requires Java 21 right off the bat in our codebase. I am in favour of updating slowly since it is not a trivial task in many organizations/users due to various reasons based on what I have seen.
However, based on what I understand, Java 21 does have performance improvements. So might be a good idea to identify timelines for that too.

[joerg1985]

I don't think there is a specific improvment in 21 that could be helpful currently.

[titusfortner]

I'm seeing this as the "End of Public Updates" for Java 17:

September 2024 for Oracle[4]
October 2027 for Eclipse Temurin[13]
October 2027 for Red Hat[8]
October 2029 for Amazon Corretto[14]
September 2029 for Azul[11]
March 2030 for BellSoft Liberica[10]

If we don't have anything specific in mind to target Java 21, I think we should continue to support Java 17

[titusfortner]

In other languages we remove support for versions that are no longer "officially" supported.
What if we do "oracle LTS - 1"
So:

• Require Java 17 on September 2024
• Require Java 21 on September 2026
• Require Java 25 on September 2028