I wish they had waited a bit longer, but I also understand that it’s expensive to maintain older products and APIs. I think the EOL for Java 7 came up really fast. This is the case for instance with Ryan Heaton, Principal Engineer at FamilySearch and creator of Enunciate, a widely used documentation engine for Java that doesn’t currently work with Java 8. This last point is putting pressure on tool creators, particularly those responsible for open-source projects, since they need to combine their day-to-day duties with the work needed to migrate to the latest Java.

This implies that users of tools that are currently incompatible with Java 8 will have to choose between keeping Java 7 and accepting the potential exposure, purchasing commercial long-term support or migrating to a different tool. The fact that Oracle won’t publish any more updates doesn’t mean that Java 7 will stop working altogether, but it does mean that patches will not be provided for any new vulnerability that might come up, thus leaving users at risk. Many tools and libraries still rely on features that were marked as deprecated in Java 7 and entirely removed in Java 8, making them incompatible with the newer version these tools will have to be modified before users can upgrade their version of Java. While this is not expected to affect ordinary users (Oracle created an automatic self-update to Java 8 in January 2015), Java developers and users of advanced applications may experience some issues. The planned EOL was originally announced in March 2014. Further public updates may be available by other vendors. Oracle ceased public availability of security fixes and upgrades for Java 7 as of April 2015, urging users to migrate to Java 8 or to purchase commercial long-term support for Java 7.

Java 7 update 21