The most important phrase in Craig's email was: "As such, I'm personally not interested in working on any revolutionary Struts or Commons designs that do not presume at least J2SE 1.4 / J2EE 1.4 as the base platform as the minimum requirement."
Tim & Craig,
I wish I could agree with you, but unfortunately I have to say that this
is a very PC- (or let me say big-time computing) centric point of view.
There are still enough platforms that are in a widespread use where even
Java 1.2 is not available, for instance MacOS 9 and, more importantly,
all sorts of micro devices and embedded systems. True, it does not make
sense to run Struts on a PDA or on a mobile phone. However,
commons-codec being a low level library may come quite handy when
developing applications for PDAs. Same story goes for HttpClient, which
has recently become dependent on commons-codec. HttpClient in its turn
is a dependency for XML-RPM. Making Codec require Java 1.4 (at this
point) will cause a rippling effect on many other projects which are
dependent (either directly or indirectly) on this library.
IMHO, Commons-Codec as well as Commons HttpClient being low level libraries should target as wider user base as possible. Funny enough, we (HttpClient) still get requests for Java 1.1.8 compatibility once in a while. Some people went ever as far as creating a semi-official Java 1.1.8 fork to cater to their specific needs. The last thing I would like to see is a Java 1.2.x fork in addition to that.
I am not saying Codec should not go forward and adopt new features in the Java platform that sense for it. However, we should consider not only the risk of working ourselves out of existence but also the risk of ending up working just for ourselves.
At the very least I would like to see a more coherent policy towards
Java platform compatibility across all Commons sub-project. I believe
there must be a common baseline we should all agree upon and then stick
to, whatever it is.
Cheers,
Oleg
I still really get a strong sense that more "Tag and Branching" would be an empowerment here, HttpClient for j2sdk 1.4 and greater could take advantage of those features 1.4 provides (for instance "nio") while a maintence branch on < 1.4 could maintain release for those specific JVM's.
-Mark
-- Mark Diggory Software Developer Harvard MIT Data Center http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
