[Java] Upgrade Java version used by toolchain to Java 21 or latest

[laurentgo]

Describe the enhancement requested

As of today, Java 8 or higher is required to build Arrow. This is the version used to launch the Maven process and used by the plugins, including maven-compiler-plugin (and indirectly by javac or equivalent).

As the tools and plugins used by Arrow are dropping support for Java 8 bit by bit (and potentially Java 11 as well) and as the Java project also keeps introducing new features of potential interest to the community at a regular 6month cadence, updating the toolchain accordingly and regularly seems to become more and more important.

The proposal is to change Java version requirement to build Arrow to use the latest released version.

The proposal does not change the Java version requirement to use Arrow (which would be still Java 8 or possibly Java 11 starting Arrow 18.0). This includes also unit testing.

To achieve this, work will be divided into multiple incremental steps:

• [Java] Add support for JDK version cross-testing
• [Java] Enforce new Java version build requirement

Component(s)

Continuous Integration, Developer Tools, Java