Application migration and modernization can be a daunting task. The release of Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit 4.2.0 has made this process easier with a number of new capabilities. This release continues the mission of helping you understand the scope, dependencies, complexity and risks that may be associated with your software migration project.

What is RHAMT?

Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit is an assembly of open source tools that enables large-scale application migrations and modernizations. Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit provides a set of utilities that facilitate the application modernization and migration process by automating the analysis, estimating the level of effort, and accelerating code changes.

How you work with the toolkit is up to you. Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit is provided as a command-line interface (CLI) including a Maven plugin, a web console, or Eclipse IDE plug-in.

What's New?

The Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit has been available for some time, but the 4.2.0 release has a number of new benefits worth exploring.

Oracle JDK to OpenJDK Migration Support

Oracle recently announced that Oracle JDK 8 builds released after January 2019 will no longer be free for commercial use, causing many organizations to rethink their strategy. One alternative to Oracle’s JDK builds is to use OpenJDK from Red Hat. Red Hat is offering an OpenJDK roadmap that can help your organization transition to OpenJDK with production support available from Red Hat through June 2023 for OpenJDK 8.

The toolkit makes the migration from OracleJDK to OpenJDK much simpler by providing the following:

• Analyze an existing Java application portfolio for required changes when moving from Oracle JDK to OpenJDK.

• Source code of the application is not needed, binary format is sufficient

• App server runtime indepence that works for Tomcat, WebSphere, WebLogic, or Spring applications.

Application Dependency Visualizations

Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit now provides the ability to visualize application dependencies at both the application and portfolio level.  This visualization is especially important in a large-scale environment with hundreds or even thousands of applications.

The 4.2.0 release has many other important features, of course. For a full list of features in this release, read the release notes.

What's Next?

The project team members are continuing to work hard to provide additional capabilities in the coming months. The areas we are focusing on currently include, but are not limited to:

• An Eclipse CHE plug-in.

• Improved integration for OpenShift.

• A ruleset for migrating from Spring Boot applications to an OpenShift supported version.

Additional Resources

• Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit 4.2.0 Release Notes

• Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit Product Page

• Migrating to OpenJDK with Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit (RHAMT) blog post

Technical Transition to OpenJDK blog post