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What will happen with RM's JRE version?

SGolbert

Hi RMers,

I have spoken with potential buyers of RM (Server + 3 Studio licences) and there have been concerns from the IT team regarding the Java version. For them, using Oracle Java 8 is not acceptable, as it doesn't have public updates anymore (however, there are security updates if you pay).

I understand than moving to the 6 month releases of Java is problematic for all, as they are untested versions that can cause stability issues. So I guess that we will use the LTS versions.

AFIK the LTS versions will be supported for 3 years through OpenJDK. Then, are there plans to move RM to OpenJDK? Will Java 11 be adopted this year?

Another question is whether this potential buyer should pay for commercial support for Java 8 until then.

Regards,

Sebastian

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Accepted answers

Marco_Boeck

Hi,

We've ran our full tests against the latest OpenJDK 8 build ~2 months ago, and everything was fine. That's not to say there may be some hidden problem somewhere in some case deep down, but we did not find any.
This is not an official endorsement, but I personally would not expect any troubles really. In the past there was a problem with H2O and OpenJDK, because the H2O library is the biggest collection of hacks I ever saw, but I think that is no longer the case.

Regards,
Marco

All comments

BalazsBaranyRM

Many people are happily using RapidMiner with OpenJDK 8. For Linux users, this is the easiest way.

SGolbert

Hi Balazs,

Does it work perfectly? in the docs it says that it is not fully compatible.

BalazsBaranyRM

I'm doing trainings and consulting with it and didn't notice any problems.

Marco_Boeck

rfuentealba

Hello all,

May I recommend to take the steps required to make OpenJDK the baseline for RapidMiner?

Rationale: OpenJDK is the base implementation of Java and it is currently maintained by Oracle. By keeping compatibility with OpenJDK, we ensure our users can run RapidMiner Studio/Server with Oracle JDK, IBM Liberty JDK 9, Azul and others and stop caring about supporting one, the old unsupported version of Java.

To the OpenJDK codebase, Oracle adds the features for paying users (meaning that if you didn't pay for JEE, you haven't implemented any of these things inside RapidMiner) and a few desktop integrations on their JDK (for example, on RapidMiner if you click the "Open File Browser here", it runs on Windows and some FreeDesktop-compliant window managers on Linux because that RapidMIner functionality relies upon the JDK to actually open the file browser there). The other thing that doesn't work properly on other OSes is the proxy setup: if OpenJDK is unable to retrieve the proxy setup from the operating system, the Wisdom of Crowds doesn't work. That's also a failure in non FreeDesktop-compatible UNIXes, and it is gracefully handled by the Mac.

That said, notice that these errors appear when you are using a non-supported platform (which is odd, because Java's motto is "write once, run everywhere, and that includes your laundry machine"). Windows and OpenJDK is fine, using macOS and OpenJDK should be fine too (I used it on the salmon farming project) and using a major distribution of Linux is fine. (Red Hat, Ubuntu or SuSE only, there is no support for LinuxMint, Slackware, Arch, Rock, or LFS among others).

Besides, if it becomes ensured that the baseline is OpenJDK 8, heading towards OpenJDK 11, 12, 13... wouldn't be much of a problem, since backwards compatibility is part of the specification.

Sorry to reopen a thread that already has a solution accepted, but this might shed some lights.

All the best,

Rod.

Marco_Boeck

Hi Rod,

We plan to officially switch to OpenJDK at the same time we switch from Java 8 to Java 11. Unfortunately, we have a few impediments making the change from Java 8 to Java 9 (the difficult step in the journey from 8 to 11) non-trivial (things like H2O and some other dependencies don't like Java 9 very much). As you said, once we are there, future updates will be much easier.

Regards,
Marco

rfuentealba

That is great to hear, @Marco_Boeck! Thank you.

SGolbert

In a tool like RapidMiner using the non-LTS version wouldn't make sense