[jakartaee-platform-dev] JDK 8 support for Jakarta EE 9

[Bill Shannon <bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I believe we agreed that JDK 8 support is optional for Jakarta EE 9.

I believe we also agreed that one of the Compatible Implementations submitted
with the specification approval MUST support all optional features.

I think this means that GlassFish is required to support JDK 8 and JDK 11.

Or is some other project planning to be the first Compatible Implementation?

I don't have a problem with allowing others to support JDK 8 and JDK 11 if they
want to, but I fear it's going to be a fair amount of work for GlassFish, and
requires a commitment from every component that contributes to GlassFish.

I'm wondering if we can instead handle this as some sort of TCK compatibility
rule instead of including it in the spec?

That's not as clean, but it would remove the spec requirement and thus allow
GlassFish to support only JDK 11 if that's what it wants to do.