java 6 ?

[tombaeyens]

Hi Guys,

I propose that we go for Java 6.  WDYT?  Scripting JSR 223 is part of JDK 6.  If we also want to support JDK 5, then it puts a great burden on us to deal with the proper libraries.  Afaict, Java 5 is already end of life.  And we plan to be GA by november…

Thoughts?

regards, tom.

[jeff1]

actually, I've been feeling a little unexpected since I found that activiti is base on jdk6(I found @override for interface implements yesterday).
allow me to illustrate my point:
there are many companies are still using jdk5 to build their codes(maybe in their mind: it runs well, why should I have to migrate to a higher edition, that costs), some vendor have gained great experience on that.
I think jdk5 would not be dead for a time. jdk is downward compatibility, maybe activiti could consider it.
during the development, we use maven-profile to automatically manage the libraries, and code like java 5(jdk5/jdk6 have no any language grammar differ but features/extra api/annotations/etc., change our compiler/jre and remove the @override on top of the method which are implements from an interface)
e.g. jdk5 -> add jsr222, jsr223, jsr224, jsr173, derby…
      jdk6 -> does not need these…
and for the available libraries we build should have detailed document to explain that situation, which jars should be use(considering what does the cxf team do, actually they should give more)

[jbarrez]

There are indeed many companies today still using JDK 5 (certainly a lot of those who are running IBM stuff).

So my vote goes for JDK5 compatibility, and coding around it where needed.

[roysong]

In my country,there's so many companies still using JDK5,and some of them still in JDK4 or lower,that's disaster….
And right now,my project is still running in JDK5,so,when I put activiti on,I found String.isEmpty() compile wrong…

[activiti-admin]

Yes. Please move to Java 6. It is not necessary to support legacy VMs for this software and the quality of the code can be improved by using Java 6 features.

[tombaeyens]

our maven compiler is configured like this:

<build>
  <plugins>
   <plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
     <source>1.5</source>
     <target>1.5</target>
     <showDeprecation>true</showDeprecation>
     <showWarnings>true</showWarnings>
     <optimize>true</optimize>
    </configuration>
   </plugin>

that should be sufficient to spot java 5 compilation problems and surely produce java 5 compatible code, right?  form the comments here I start to suspect we're missing something.

[yury_h]

There are indeed many companies today still using JDK 5 (certainly a lot of those who are running IBM stuff).

So my vote goes for JDK5 compatibility, and coding around it where needed.

Exactly that is the point 😉 Joram is right. Just have a look here:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/in...

We cannot have the elegance at any price. There are still a lot of companies using Websphere 6.1 for example. And that means J2SE5 / J2EE1.4 

[tombaeyens]

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-49