Status

Current state: Adopted

Discussion thread: http://search-hadoop.com/m/uyzND1MrUwP522Y52

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Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Java 7 hasn't received public updates since April 2015, Java 8 was released in March 2014 and Java 9 is scheduled to be released in July 2017.

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Many other open-source projects have taken the leap already. Examples are Apache Cassandra (and Java driver), Apache Spark, Apache Lucene, Apache Storm, Akka, Apache Hadoop 3, Jetty, Guava, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Jenkins and many others. Even Android will support Java 8 in the next version (although it will take a while before most phones will use that version sadly). This reduces (but does not eliminate) the chance that we would be the first project that would cause a user to consider a Java upgrade.

Public Interfaces

None.

Proposed Changes

Change sourceCompatibility from 1.7 to 1.8 in build.gradle.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

Users who cannot upgrade to Java 8 can continue to use Kafka 0.10.x until they can upgrade. 0.11.x brokers will support 0.10.x clients and 0.11.x clients will support 0.10.x brokers, so upgrades can be incremental (while keeping the older message format until enough clients have been upgraded). This is useful if some clients and/or brokers are stuck in Java 7.

Rejected Alternatives

1. Continue supporting Java 7: the benefit of dropping support outweighs the cost.
2. Continue supporting Java 7 in clients library: in some cases, users have legacy clients where upgrading to a new Java version is difficult and they would prefer if the clients library would still support Java 7. Because this tends to affect legacy clients, they can continue using Kafka 0.10.x with newer brokers (if and when the brokers are upgraded).

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