Rick Hillegas wrote: > Thanks, Dan. As we move forward, we're going to need to run Derby on > 1.6.x and expose a JDBC4.0 implementation. Since JDBC4.0 signatures > include parameterized collections, we'll want to build at least part of > Derby with a 1.6 compiler. What are your thoughts about the compilers > and test environments which Derby needs to support?
For J2ME I set up optional build targets, so that folks were not required to download J2ME jars in order to compile Derby successfully. Obviously people who don't build the optional J2ME targets do not build a Derby that can run on J2ME. OSGi support is similar. Advance support of JDK 1.6/JDBC 4.0 may require a similar approach. Provide for people who want to run in that environment the ability to compile Derby to use JDK 1.6 and JDBC 4.0. At some point it becomes appropriate for the standard Derby build to require certain environments, currently that the requirement is JDK 1.3 and JDK 1.4 build environments (and the resulting code runs in 1.3,1.4&1.5). The point is very much a judgement call within the community, the next step may be that Derby only builds if JDK 1.4 and JDK 1.5 are present, so when is JDK 1.5 pervasive enough so that it's not an undue burden on a developer to download it? While Java is compile once and run everywhere, the environment for the 'once' is not a fixed OS in the open source world. If some OS doesn't have a 1.5 VM then we may not want to stop Derby from being compilable on that OS. Any release build would hopefully include all the optional build targets, so that a fully functioning Derby was the result (i.e. for 10.1 J2ME and OSGi support). Dan.
