Eventually, was it ever an issue?
For some customers, it definitely was.
I know it's not that black and white and playing the devil's advocate a little here; but if it was up to that category of customers, Jakarta EE would probably just now be moving to Java 6, don't you think? And even then there would be pressure to still support Java 5 today.
I appreciate that those concerns for those customers are real. In no way would I belittle that, but the simple answer is for them to stay on Java 6 and Java EE 6, and get some kind of extended support from their vendor.
What I find strange is the thinking that there are customers that want to upgrade in a very unbalanced way. E.g. stay of Java 6, but update to Jakarta EE 8. In my personal experience updating a JDK is far less troublesome than updating an application server. So it just seems very unlikely they absolutely resist updating the JDK, but update the AS willy nilly on a friday afternoon, yelling yolo!
That's impossible to say. Looking in the past though, corporations and government agencies are slow to adopt new things. Does that mean they may be slow to adopt Jakarta REST 4.0? Probably, [...]
For now I'd just leave it at that.
This all said, if the committers decide to move to JDK 17 and not 21 for Jakarta REST 4.0, then it's fine to me, but hopefully it's for another reason than the one stated above.
Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms
