I think it is best to compile http against servlet 2.1 and also provide a servlet 2.1 bundle to your customers. They can choose to use a different version of servlet if they wish.
There are interfaces in the servlet API which have been added to over later releases. If I compile a servlet bundle against servlet 2.1, it may not load against a later servlet API version since I do not implement the missing methods. -- BJ Hargrave Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM OSGi Fellow and CTO of the OSGi Alliance [EMAIL PROTECTED] office: +1 386 848 1781 mobile: +1 386 848 3788 "Richard S. Hall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2007-07-25 08:48 Please respond to [email protected] To [email protected] cc Subject Re: Do we need javax.servlet? Rob Walker wrote: > I'm pretty sure I'm correct in saying that our company has used later > versions of servlet that 2.1 with no adverse effects, even though our > code doesn't actually make use of features later than 2.1. So I'd > stick a tentative hand up and say that later versions seem backwards > compatible, at least in the main. > > Given that - is the desire to stay on 2.1 mainly to enforce strict 2.1 > adherence i.e. not even allow later features, or do we know if others > have experienced problems. > > Thought being that if in the main later versions are compatible, then > there's less risk/issue in including a more recent version? BJ might have more to say here, but the issue is mainly that the spec for HTTP Service requires javax.servlet 2.1. This is not to say that end users cannot link it against newer versions if it doesn't cause them issues. However, the implementation of HTTP Service should be compiled against 2.1 during development to make sure it doesn't have dependencies on anything other than what is in 2.1, which it did previously...this is similar to how we should be compiling Felix against the foundation classes... Also, there is the risk that if newer versions of servlet are used that some of the newer aspects of those features will not work as expected since our impl doesn't account for them, thus end users might expect that they do work as expected and run into issues. -> richard
