Where Show Leopard rewrote the Finder in Cocoa, brought Grand Central Dispatch, and improved power management, Mountain Lion bought Gatekeeper and focused on making it easier to manage and synchronise content between multiple Apple devices. Each bought a handful of new features but mostly focused on under-the-hood changes, rather than improving the apps we use day-to-day. These were smaller updates that came after the more flashy Lion and Leopard versions of OS X. Here is a flowchart that might help guide you in choosing a source for Java 11.We were expecting High Sierra to be an update similar to Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard. This approach using rapid delivery train with LTS is new in the Java world. Free-of-cost implementations may also receive updates under LTS from some providers. This applies, at least, customers paying a commercial vendor. This means the version will receive updates and fixes for years instead of months. Versions 8 and 11 are both LTS, as will be version 17. The exception is that every three years, the sixth release in succession shall be designated a Long-Term Support (LTS) version. However, these versions may not be supported free-of-cost with patches after the successive version arrives. These are production-ready fully-tested releases.

Every six months a new version arrives, as discussed in this article. Oracle and the Java community have adopted a faster cadences for releases, a fashion known as the Release Train. Note that Java development has changed recently. Java 12, not yet released for production, runs on High Sierra as well.

The implementations of Java 8, 9, 10, and 11 based on OpenJDK from vendors such as Azul Systems, Oracle, and AdoptOpenJDK run on macOS High Sierra and Mojave (and some older macOS as well).

Java mac os high sierra review