Raymond Feng wrote:
Hi,
We had a discussion before on which JDK level is required for Tuscany
Java SCA 2.x. There is an announcement on InfoQ.com [1] that Sun's
implementation of J2SE 5.0 reached its End of Service Life (EOSL) on
November the 3rd 2009, which is the date of the final publicly available
update of version 5.0 (J2SE 5.0 Update 22). I think it's time to revisit
this issue.
I think making JSE 6 as the minimum JDK level will greatly simplify
Tuscany dependencies and make it possible to run core functions with
just the JDK.
There are a bunch of javax packages available in JSE 6 (not in JSE 5),
for example:
javax.xml.stream (StAX)
javax.xml.bind (JAXB)
javax.jws and javax.xml.ws (JAX-WS)
javax.script (Scripting APIs)
The link at [2] gives us an overview of what JSE 6 added.
The JDK requirement can be enforced using maven enforcer plugin.
[1] http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/java5_eosl
[2] http://java.sun.com/javase/6/features.jsp
Thanks,
Raymond
---
Raymond Feng
Apache Tuscany PMC Member: http://tuscany.apache.org
Co-author of Tuscany In Action (A book on Tuscany SCA):
http://tuscanyinaction.com/
Raymond,
This is a good question.
Just a small personal perspective, I've been running Tuscany (and Eclipse and all the other Java
tools I use) with the Sun JDK 6 for well over a year now and I rarely if ever use JDK 5.
However, the question that we need to ask is what requiring JDK 6 will do to our users. The benefits
to us as developers are surely second place to that.
It has certainly been the experience of commercial vendors that many users/customers are relatively
slow to move up to new versions of the JDK - but how much does that apply to an open source project
such as Tuscany? One question that must be asked is whether associated tools will have problems if
we require JDK 6.
Now, I know from personal experience that Eclipse is fine with JDK 6, but there are a lot of other
tools that people may be using.
I suppose that one route forward here is to simply pose the question on the user mailing list and
have an associated page on the website, to make as many people as possible aware that we are
contemplating this change. Let's see if any users have a problem with leaving JDK 5 behind...
Yours, Mike.
