[emoII]

Never understood why you’d use sdkman for Java. I just do:

1. brew install openjdk@<version>

2. ln -s <homebrew path> </Library/JavaVirtualMachines/>

3. /libexec/java_home -v <version>

Afaik, with some aliases in you *shrc it basically reimplements sdkman, what else does it give you?

[hintymad]

This works if all you need is OpenJDK. Per the article, sdkman allows one to install and switch between different versions and brands of JDKs.

[lmm]

> Per the article, sdkman allows one to install and switch between different versions and brands of JDKs.

OK but what benefit does that give? I hope we're not back to the bad old days of different apps needing different brands of JDK to run on.

[hddherman]

It's really handy for switching between projects that are on different Java versions, plus tools like IntelliJ pick up on the correct version via the SDKMAN! configuration as well.

[lmm]

OK but again what's the use case for that? Can you not just use a new version of Java for all your projects, at most setting -source/-target in your project configuration? Certainly in the old days it was always backwards compatible, at least enough that you could develop under a current version and maybe just have a CI job to check that your code still worked on old versions.

[vladgur]

In a large organization with hundreds of business-critical Java applications you can bring them all up to one version at once. It’s quite normal to have multiple versions of JDK being used by different applications

[Freak_NL]

It's not only normal, it is completely to be expected. Even if you have only one project, there will come a time when one branch will be used to test the jump from 17 to 24 or something like that, so you'll work on that, but also switch back to the master branch when a colleague needs some help there.

  sdk use java xxx

And done. A new LTS is released? Just sdk install it. Set the one you use most as default, and focus on the project instead of managing JDKs.

Oh, and very occasionally you'll actually get hit by a bug within one Java major version (like when they removed historic offsets from the timezone database included in the JVM, that was fun). At that point being able to switch between minor versions easily is quite nice.

[lmm]

I've been lucky enough that the large organisations I worked for generally had policies and enforcement to ensure that all applications were kept current. It's more initial effort but it pays dividends.

But even if you don't have that, most people work on at most a handful of apps at a time, and again I would defer checking against a specific version to CI most of the time rather than switching around which JVM I'm using locally, unless your code was very tightly coupled to JVM internals somehow.

[emoII]

Steps 2 & 3 expands to any installation method and version of java