Breaking changes to rest-services.client coming

[rmcdouga]

We are anticipating a couple of breaking changes that are coming to the rest-services.client library.

We'd like to separate out the dependency on jersey into a separate rest-client project. This will make it possible for alternative rest-clients (such as the new Spring RestClient for the fluentforms-spring-boot-starter). It will also allow more flexibility in utilizing different versions of the Jersey library. If this had been in place before, then jersey's transition from the javax to jakarta namespace could have been implemented in a a less abrupt fashion.

Also, we're anticipating moving the minimum requirements for the client libraries to be at least Java 11 and perhaps Java 17 or Java 21. The current situation where the rest-services.client and rest-services.server are both tied to the same Java version (8) is entirely unnecessary. While we don't have control of the AEM Java requirements (still 8 or 11 at this time), in our experience, the client applications that use the library are more flexible. Using a later version of Java would afford us access to newer language and JDK library features that would make our libraries easier to maintain. The spring-boot-starter already requires Java 17, so this would be the likely minimum.

This is not going to happen immediately and is not set in stone. It will probably be several months before the work is completed, so feedback is welcome.

[rmcdouga]

Work is complete, and is now in 0.0.4-SNAPSHOT.