Sun and Hewlett-Packard have completed their End-of-Life processes for Java 2 SDK Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.3, and IBM will be doing so later this year.  If your E-Business Suite environment is still on that Java release, there are some important support implications that you should consider.

“Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow”

With apologies to the immortal Bard, I know that some of you may feel the same way about parting with J2SE 1.3.  Here are the published End-of-Life dates from three key J2SE vendors:

“End-of-Life” is a Euphemism

All three of the key vendors listed above — Sun, HP, and IBM — strongly recommend that you upgrade your environment to their latest supported J2SE release. 

Here’s an insider’s tip:  software vendors really prefer to avoid terms like “desupport” and “mandatory upgrade” since they conjure up uncomfortable images of shivering customers left out in the cold.  So, they abjure those terms for more-innocuous phrases like “end-of-life” and “strongly recommend.” 

However, don’t be fooled by the seemingly-innocent nature of those euphemisms.  Wherever you see those phrases anywhere on a vendor’s site (including this one), you should really pay attention. 

It’s extremely painful and costly to support very old software releases.  For example, here at Oracle, we maintain thousands of E-Business Suite environments.  These environments run on J2SE 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 (5.0), and 1.6 (6.0).  At some point, older environments are decommissioned, making it very difficult for us to validate issues reported on old releases.

At some point, a vendor’s ability to reproduce or even investigate issues with obsolete releases dwindles asymptotically to zero.  So, if a vendor strongly encourages you to upgrade, they’re dead serious.

Implications for E-Business Suite Release 11i Users

With those basics out of the way, here are the implications if your Apps 11i environment is running on servers with J2SE 1.3:
  1. If you log a Service Request for your environment, Oracle will continue to perform its usual diagnosis, triage, and search through our knowledge base for existing patches and workarounds.   This assistance may be constrained by limited access to a small number of remaining environments running J2SE 1.3.  It is extremely unlikely that we will issue new Apps patches for new compatibility issues identified with the E-Business Suite and J2SE 1.3.
  2. Issues isolated to J2SE 1.3 itself will be referred to your operating system vendor for more assistance.  Depending on your vendor, you may be able to purchase extended support for J2SE 1.3 directly from them.
  3. Issues that can’t be reproduced in E-Business Suite environments running on J2SE 1.4 or 1.5 (5.0) will likely result in a recommendation to upgrade to those later releases.
  4. Oracle will continue to support JInitiator 1.3.x for Apps 11i users.  Sun’s desupport of J2SE 1.3 doesn’t affect Oracle’s JInitiator 1.3 support policies.
A Well-Trodden Path

Many Apps 11i customers have already upgraded to J2SE 1.5 (5.0) successfully, and we strongly recommend this release.  This latest release has many significant improvements in memory management, garbage collection, performance optimization, and monitoring and tuning capabilities.  For details on upgrading your E-Business Suite environment to J2SE 1.5 (5.0), see:
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