Spike: Java 9 and Java EE 8

[djbrooke]

An investigation about what needs to be done to upgrade our infrastructure to support:

• Java 9
• Java EE 8
• Glassfish 5 (will be handled in Glassfish 5 Upgrade #4248 instead)

Output of this spike will be well-informed items detailing the upgrade steps and things to test.

[pdurbin]

Java 9

I don't believe it makes sense to upgrade to Java 9 at this time. It's only been out for a few weeks so Linux vendors haven't had time to package it as java-1.9.0-openjdk. We want the same easy upgrade that we had from Java 7 to Java 8 where we simply change a single digit in a yum command like we did in 1abbd77 for #2151.

The next question is, "When will we be able to simply run yum install java-1.9.0-openjdk on CentOS and get Java 9? I'm not exactly sure but we can expect java-1.9.0-openjdk to land first in Fedora and then CentOS. According to https://fedoraproject.org//wiki/Changes/Java9TechPreview Java 9 will be part of Fedora 27 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1447237 appears to be the tracking bug for including it. We've been able to happily run the java-1.8.0-openjdk RPM on CentOS 6 and I'm not sure if that means we'll be able to run java-1.9.0-openjdk on CentOS 6 as well or if we'll need to upgrade to CentOS 7. According to the "Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap" doc at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html Java 8 will stop receiving security updates in Sep 2018.

[pdurbin]

Glassfish 5

Today at our architecture meeting we talked a bit about Glassfish 5 vs Payara. I believe the primary thing our customers want is security. At @bjonnh said, "I'm annoyed that we have to use horribly old software and be stuck with it." @donsizemore opened #4172 asking about Payara support.

The thing about Payara is that it's updated more regularly than Glassfish. Here's a little chart I made from a spreadsheet I made based on release dates on Wikipedia. Note how regular the Payara releases are:

More regular releases probably means better security, right? I would hope so. Anyway, over at #4172 I'm asking when we should expect Payara 5 because it would be nice to upgrade to the latest major version if we can. As @landreev mentioned in the meeting today, maybe it wouldn't be too tough to support both Glassfish and Payara. I'm not sure. So far I've been hacking a bit on trying to get Dataverse running on Glassfish 5 and I assume that work will carry over fine to Payara 5. I'll push a branch once I have something to show. At a high level, we need to update the following:

• Dataverse installer
• Vagrant files
• Docker files
• Installation Guide
• Dev Guide

We might need to change our Java code itself but I hope not. We'll see.

[pdurbin]

I missed sprint planning yesterday but I heard this issue got moved to the backlog. At standup I mentioned I'd push what I was working on to my fork, which I just did: pdurbin@d757099