While I'm personally all for Java 5, I know a lot of institutions that have
been very slow to migrate to Java 5, much less Java 6. This means that JRuby
might not be as widely used as it could (and should) be. On the other hand,
some of the institutions I'm thinking of aren't forward-thinking enough to
adopt JRuby anyway ;)
The Spring community has wrestled with the same issues, for the same
reasons. I haven't checked lately about their current strategy with Spring
v2, so it might be worth looking at what they are doing.
So, it's a tough call, but given the issues you listed below, I'd vote
+1.
Dean
On 7/23/07, Charles Oliver Nutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Before we released 1.0, we discussed the possibility of making future
releases of JRuby based on Java 5 instead of Java 1.4.2. I think it's
time to raise that question again.
We have a 1.0 release out now, which largely seems to be very solid and
very well received. Compatibility is very good and performance is
comfortable enough to be safely used in real production apps. We will
maintain the 1.0 branch for users of JRuby 1.0, which will receive
compatibility and minor performance fixes as appropriate. Release 1.0.1
will be coming out soon with a large collection of fixes migrated from
the trunk work and from a couple large users of JRuby that have been
helping to merge stuff across.
But the lack of Java 5 support in trunk is now starting to hold back
development. A short list of things we could actually make use of:
- Enums for the many flags and specifiers in the system
- Real concurrent collections, rather than emulated implementations from
the backport library
- Annotations for specifying method bindings. This could largely
eliminate the need for manual method-binding code, as well as allow us
to split method implementations by arity and even argument type
- Support for Java 5 constructs (generics, varargs, enums) in Java
integration
- Elimination of a few areas of inefficiency: environment variables,
Integer.valueOf (Integer caching), various String manipulation methods,
Charset conversions...
So there's lots of reasons to start making trunk Java 5+ only. And we
made good on our promise to release JRuby 1.0 compatible with Java 1.4.2.
Perhaps it's time we made the move to Java 5?
- Charlie
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Dean Wampler
http://www.objectmentor.com
http://www.aspectprogramming.com
http://www.contract4j.org
