From the course: Java: Advanced Concepts for High-Performance Development

Which version of Java to use? - Java Tutorial

From the course: Java: Advanced Concepts for High-Performance Development

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Which version of Java to use?

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- [Instructor] In this course, I'll be using OpenJDK 17. To be able to use all the features in this course, you will need to have at least Java 8 installed, but feel free to use any later version as well. Choosing which Java version to use isn't completely straightforward. Java has a 6-month release cycle, but not all Java releases are the same. Some are known as long-term support releases and others are feature releases. Long-term support releases are supported by Oracle for years, whereas feature releases are only supported until the next release six months later. The current long-term support release is Java 17, and the next one will be Java 21 in September 2023. Long-term support releases are more likely to be used by development teams. There are now two types of JDK provided by Oracle. One is Oracle's commercial JDK and the other is their OpenJDK. These two different releases actually work the same and have all the same features so you could swap between them without having to make any changes to your code. However, you do have to pay to use the Oracle JDK in production. It's free for individual use, development, and testing, and it also comes with paid support. Oracle's OpenJDK is completely free and is open source. However, it doesn't come with support or updates to versions older than the current version. As well as the two Oracle JDKs, There are also lots of versions of both the commercial JDK and OpenJDK not provided by Oracle. Some popular versions of OpenJDK include Adoptium, Amazon Corretto, Red Hat, and several others. I'd recommending using any one of the OpenJDK versions for this course. I'll be using Adoptium, but it doesn't matter which one you decide to go with.

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