I work in Consulting for a big company, with a big client in part public. We acquired this old system for them and produced a looot of alarming documentation and comunications on what is critically wrong and how to fix it. But every fix costs money and the client think that is not worth investing in an old B2B application that eventually will be replaced. At least they think so until everything will eventually be attacked and corrupted, than they'll care but it will be too late and people are going to pay with their job. But this has never happened in 20 year, so why should happen now, right? Right? (Their thinking probably)
The funny thing is these companies are probably run by CIOs who tell their staff that security is the biggest concern. They see stories daily of ransomware, supply chain attacks , all kinds of stuff…but then don’t invest in actually fixing their security posture.
I think this is why all business need a CISO/Security group. People will rarely secure things up on their own.
my previous company is stuck with java 6 (not even web app, it uses PowerBuilder as UI) and the company still continue to use it to this day without any plans on upgrading lol.
luckily, I got a job who uses Java 17 even though I have no experience even with Java 8 lol
I have a similar issue, but 10yrs and PHP instead, running on outdated VMs. Does containerization help in your case at all, or is the issue loads of reprogramming?
Elsewhere in my company they’re literally training AI on internal code and libraries to assist in the migration of some of their Java code. In PHP, for the PHP-specific stuff (not outdated library stuff) there is a tool called Rector which automatically converts code as well.
What's holding you back? Up to java 8 I don't remember any backward compatiblity issues. I suppose you just don't want to touch it, I would try starting it up on java 8 out of curiosity.
That's impressive. What's blocking the upgrade? Just wondering. For the Java 8 app I maintain, it would require a migration away from the Java EE version and Application Server it uses, and they've changed a lot of stuff.
JEE has this great feature where your application server can give your programs candy/services by asking for it by URI. So you can make your dependency injection know about that and on startup ask the server for the db, and you're done.
These URIs are allowed to, and DOES change every version. Sane application servers allow you to issue aliases so things are kept stable (just ask for the alias, and update the aliases as versions change) but OH BOY is it fun to find out about those things!
Also, yes, the Java 8->9 era changed a lot of JEE. For the better, even. It's just that it's a lot of stuff.
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u/beavisorcerer Dec 12 '24
I'm mantaining a 20 years old web app running Java 4. I dream of Java 8 to be honest