Upgrading open source libraries in Web application

26 views Asked by At

I am working on a J2EE web-application. I would like to upgrade some of major open-source libraries from older version to newer one based on availability of libraries on maven repository. For example of libraries : Google-Sitebricks, Jetty, JSON, Jackson, JUnit, HttpClient etc. What would be the best way to ensure that the after upgrades, there are no side-effects/leakages happened in application. Here, I tested the application's basic functionalities like sanity test to ensure its working or breaking the things. I am wondering on what is the standard process need to be followed in such scenarios. Please suggest the effective & best approaches/practices for this. Thanks

1

There are 1 answers

0
Ken Koster On

Test, test, and test. And then test some more.

Hopefully you have automated tests which will shake out problems. If not, you will find yourself spending a lot of cycles manually testing. Just sanity checks may not be enough; version upgrades can break functionality in subtle ways.

Even before you get to the testing, you may find that your application fails to compile after upgrading the libraries.

In any case, I would not upgrade many libraries all at once, except when upgrading a library causes a cascade of upgrades in transitive dependencies. Upgrading them one by one is the safest thing to do.