We're slowly preparing a release of velocity 1.8. Are there any issues the cayenne project would like to see fixed in 1.8? This is bug-fix/dependency/modernization release. All new feature requests continue to be velocity 2.x only.
I think the current plan is to officially support and release against java 1.7, but I don't think we're going to do anything which would prevent recompiling against an older version of java (unless one of our dependency upgrades prevent that).
