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Earlier this year, Liferay announced our Java Evolution beginning with runtime support for Java 17 and 21. As we wrap up the year, we wanted to share an update on how our evolution is going and what you can expect in 2025. Culminating in the migration to Jakarta EE 10, the year ahead is exciting and challenging as we open up new technologies that have never been available to our engineers, clients, and partners.

The Jakarta Journey

The most significant evolution stage in 2025 will be our migration from Java EE 8 to Jakarta EE 10. The reasons for this change were detailed in the previous blog post. We are excited to announce that this change is expected as soon as Q3 2025.

Existing PaaS and on-premise installations of DXP looking to upgrade to 2025.Q3 or later will be impacted. Any custom code deployed inside of DXP will need to be migrated to Jakarta EE 10 to do this upgrade. We know this is a potentially painful migration for custom development and we want to help equip our users for this challenge. As Liferay implements this migration ourselves on our large codebase, we will share what we learn along the way.

For our users on our SaaS offerings, no need to worry about this change. Our internal cloud team will be deploying the new versions while existing Objects and Client Extension customizations will continue to work as before. An added benefit of our Modern Liferay Application Development customizations is that they do not depend on direct deployment into the Liferay JVM, making upgrades much easier.

Application Servers

One of the benefits of our migration to Jakarta is that we can upgrade to the latest versions of our Java application servers, along with their respective security and performance improvements. Since Jakarta EE 10 is a major breaking change, we will be moving exclusively to the new app server versions. To prepare for this, Liferay is announcing the deprecation of the existing application servers. The ongoing app server support will correspond to the Enterprise Java API used in each release.

*Weblogic 15 release will depend on Oracle’s release timeline. As of this post, Oracle have only given CY2025 as the release timeline for the new version of Weblogic on Jakarta EE 10.

For our enterprise users who need more time, Liferay recently announced that our Q1 releases “will be designated as the Long-Term Support (LTS) version, which has a three- (3) year Premium Support Phase followed by a two- (2) year Limited Support Phase.” This means that 2025.Q1 will be an LTS release staying on Java EE 8 and supporting the existing application servers.

Compile Support

With runtime for Liferay Portal and DXP being upgraded to the latest LTS versions of Java, naturally there is fresh demand for the ability to compile custom code with some of the new Java features. This transition phase has sometimes required code to be compiled on an older version and then deployed on a newer runtime version. In order to improve this, we will be compiling DXP on Java 17 to ensure compatibility with newer features. This is expected to come early next year in our upcoming releases.

For 2025, DXP will use Java 17 as the compiler to maintain Java 17 runtime compatibility. This does mean there is still a possible mismatch in Java versions between compile (17) and runtime (21). Please plan accordingly for this temporary transition phase. Java 21 runtime is still the recommended runtime version as it is the faster and more secure version of the Java JDK.

Our developer workspace (Gradle, Blade, IDE plugins) released support for building Java 17 and 21 custom modules this year. We will continue to provide developers the tooling to build customizations on top of Liferay throughout our Java migration changes.

Java 21

With the completion of the Jakarta and application servers next year, Liferay will turn our attention to the end goal, becoming a Java 21 enterprise platform. Java 21 brings some exciting new features that can significantly improve performance and reduce cloud costs. This means that Java 17 will need to be deprecated as we plan to fully focus on Java 21 (compile and runtime) in 2026.

2025 Roadmap

To summarize all of these changes, here is our roadmap for 2025:

All of this change is critical as Liferay wants to continue to build innovative solutions with high performance and security. These migrations will help future-proof our system to meet the demands of the modern enterprise. Thank you for joining us for this journey.