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In case you missed it, Liferay has announced the deprecation of Websphere for Liferay DXP 7.4.

The official announcement was made here: https://support.liferay.com/release-notes/2023-q4, scroll down near the bottom to the Feature Status Change section or just search the page for WebSphere and you'll find the reference. Additionally, there's a note on the 7.4 Compatibility Matrix that also indicates WebSphere is deprecated as of the 2023.Q4 release.

The fault is on IBM really. WebSphere's latest version is 9, and WAS 9 only supports JDK 8 which is EOL.

By end of year, Liferay plans on being compatible with JDK 21 and updating the Java compile target and third party dependencies, so that will leave WAS 9 completely in the rearview as we drive away.

So if you're currently running Liferay on WebSphere and you're on 7.4 and staying up to date on the quarterly releases, you may want to start planning your migration off of WebSphere sooner, rather than later.

For what it's worth, I'd recommend ditching any application server besides Tomcat... The incompatibility with WebSphere and higher JDKs is going to hit WebLogic and some of the other older application servers that are no longer seeing updates.

Even for Tomcat, Liferay will be using an updated version to leverage the newer JDKs. Being on Tomcat 9 now (or soon) will be an easy transition to Tomcat 10+ when the time comes.