Which version of Java to use

Having received new question whose answer was related to version of Java, we think this is a good moment to test again DGT-OmegaT to decide which versions of Java it is compatible with.

Summary at the end of the article

From Java 9 to 11

Let's remember result of our previous test: since we decided not to include JAXB in our archive (contrarily to standard OmegaT) we know that DGT-OmegaT requires extra download to be used on Java >= 9. Let's publish an actualized list:

1. Download from JAXB
2. Copy the following files from the archive into the lib directory:
   • jaxb-api.jar
   • jaxb-impl.jar
   • jaxb-core.jar

This is not true for new branch 3.7-DEV, which explicitly requires Java 9 or later. In this branch we removed the last dependencies to JAXB, so it is not required anymore (due to risk of bug we do it only on DEV for the moment).

For Java > 11

DGT-OmegaT 3.4 to 3.6 + JAXB, and 3.7 without JAXB, work correctly from Java 8 to 15.

In version 16, Java did an important change: calls to methods from package com.sun (for which Sun previously adviced to avoid them, did not guarantee usability in the future) are now forbidden unless you explicitly allowed them.

If you run with Java 16 or 17 you should receive an error like

WARNING: An illegal reflective access operation has occurred

To have DGT-OmegaT working again you must add

--illegal-access=permit 

in the launcher (OmegaT.bat for Windows, OmegaT for linux).

We must audit the code but we don't remember there is any call to such libraries in OmegaT itself. But we strongly suspect that some libraries used by OmegaT do such calls which prevent OmegaT to run. Still under investigation.

Summary