Java upgrades and modernization at scale

Automate Java upgrades across thousands of repositories with a platform built for consistency, security, and speed.

Java runs in over 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

Java powers systems that move money, book travel, and secure healthcare data. But outdated Java versions introduce security vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, and rising costs.

Extended support costs millions, yet delivers no progress. Each skipped Java release multiplies upgrade complexity 2–3 times, accelerating technical debt.

Moderne gave us a way to scale — automating the things we used to do by hand and helping us move faster with more confidence.

Engineering Team Lead

Financial Services Company

Why java modernization breaks down at scale

Multi-repo environment: Thousands of repositories and services must be upgraded together.
Fragmented teams: Distributed ownership makes coordination difficult.
Security exposure: Delayed upgrades leave systems open to CVEs and exploits.
Cost and complexity: Manual refactoring takes months, multiplied across entire portfolios.

62 % of organizations still rely on legacy systems.

At enterprise scale, that means thousands of repos running outdated Java—each with different owners, dependencies, and risks.

How Moderne enables safe, scalable Java upgrades

Traditional methods fail at scale. Moderne is built to combine deterministic changes with multi-repo orchestration, solving the two problems that block enterprise upgrades.

Java upgrades powered by:

Semantic accuracy

Built on OpenRewrite’s Lossless Semantic Tree (LST), Moderne operates on everything the compiler knows about the code plus type attribution, symbol resolution, and even formatting. This enables context-aware, deterministic, repeatable transformations and clean, reviewable diffs—not fragile regex matches.

Multi-repo orchestration

Run campaigns across hundreds or thousands of repos in parallel. OpenRewrite recipes execute at scale with built-in rollback, impact analysis, and coverage reporting from a single control plane.

Enterprise integration & control

Native integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Campaign dashboards provide organization-wide progress, audit trails, compliance reporting, and per-change provenance.

AI + determinism

When using Moddy, Moderne’s multi-repo AI agent, you can precisely navigate through your Java codebases. Moddy surfaces relevant recipes and summarizes outcomes, but every change is accurate —deterministic changes you can trust.

How Moderne automates Java modernization

Moderne delivers automated Java refactoring built on OpenRewrite. Moderne's Lossless Semantic Tree (LST) enables programmatic transformations using OpenRewrite recipes that understand Java semantics and preserve code fidelity—going far beyond search-and-replace or AST-only tools.

what can you do with moderne

Java version upgrades: Java 8 → 11 → 17 → 21 at scale. Recipes handle deprecated/removed APIs (e.g., javax.xml.bind), dependency and build tool updates (Maven/Gradle), and new language constructs.
Framework & library migrations: Jakarta EE namespace changes (javax.* → jakarta.*), Spring Boot upgrades, JUnit 4 → 5, logging framework swaps.
Security remediation: Automated CVE patches (e.g., Log4Shell), vulnerable dependency replacement, TLS/crypto hardening, compliance-ready reports.‍
Continuous hygiene: Adoption of new standards, deprecation cleanup, dependency conflict resolution, standardized build configs to reduce future upgrade effort.

Choice Hotels: Java 8 to 21 upgrade automated across hundreds of services—without slowing feature delivery

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Fortune 500 Finance: Global banks automate Java upgrades & CVE fixes across thousands of repos, cutting manual review

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How Moderne runs a Java upgrade at scale

Step 1 — Discover a recipe

Choose a recipe to run—for example, upgrading Java 8 to 17 across repositories.

Step 2 — Run across repos

Run the recipe across all repositories and immediately see the proposed changes.

Step 3 — Moderne goes beyond version bumps

Recipe captures modern Java best practices and extends to Spring, JUnit, and other frameworks.

Step 4 — Upgrade the full stack

The recipe updates APIs, libraries, and configs so the entire Java stack upgrades together.

Step 5 — Submit at scale

Submit results as mass commits or pull requests for consistent changes across teams.

Step 6 — Review and merge

Teams review and merge with confidence, knowing changes are consistent everywhere.

Upgrade Java with Confidence with Moderne

Upgrading Java isn't just maintenance, it's essential for security, compliance, and innovation. Moderne is the only platform that makes upgrades deterministic, scalable, and safe across your entire code estate.