End of first-class JDK 6 support [SPR-16185]

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller opened SPR-16185 and commented

As indicated by #20731, JDK 6 is severely outdated and effectively unmaintained in the meantime. The official end of of commercial JDK 6 support is coming up soon, with Oracle (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html) as well as IBM (https://developer.ibm.com/wasdev/docs/end-java-se-6-go/).

We'll have to join the club there, simply documentating that Spring Framework 4.3.x users are expected to be on recent patch releases of JDK 7, 8 or 9 these days. Let's roll this into 4.3.13's documentation and also blog about it around that time, officially declaring the end of first-class JDK 6 support on our end.

To be clear, we'll keep tolerating JDK 6 at runtime in the entire Spring Framework 4.3.x line, even in upcoming maintenance releases for the next few years. We just won't test on JDK 6 ourselves anymore and won't work around any JDK 6 specific issues, asking people to upgrade to JDK 7+ instead.

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Issue Links:

• Upgrade to CGLIB 3.2.5 [SPR-15147] #19713 Upgrade to CGLIB 3.2.5
• Upgrade to Objenesis 2.6 for Google App Engine Standard on Java 8 and for better JDK 9 support [SPR-15600] #20159 Upgrade to Objenesis 2.6 for Google App Engine Standard on Java 8 and for better JDK 9 support
• SettableListenableFuture set has a race on Java6 (and old versions of Java7) [SPR-16183] #20731 SettableListenableFuture set has a race on Java6 (and old versions of Java7)

Referenced from: commits ffbaa26

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

Note added to 4.3.13 documentation. Blog post following next week.