Hi all, looking at the roadmap towards 2.4.0 release of UIMA SDK I was wondering why not migrate to Java 6 and consequently drop Java 5 support. The 2.3.1 version is known to be stable enough to keep it as the last Java 5 enabled version in my opinion to allow backward compatibility.
This way we may also open up to integrate easier with a number of other open source projects which adopt Java 6. Just as an example, some months ago I was working on the RDF CAS Consumer using Clerezza but then (my fault) I realized it was not possible to use it on Java 5 as Clerezza uses Java 6 however this alone wouldn't be a strong enough reason. Other much more important reasons, in my opinion, lie in bugs in Java 5 which have been fixed only in Java 6, see this one from Lucene as an example: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-3235 Consider also that some bugs have been resolved in minor versions of Java 6 so this wouldn't secure things 100% from previous bugs, but I think that doing a minor version upgrade (usually to at least 1.6.0_18) is trivial while changing major versions could be an issue with a big project. By the way, it seems Lucene 3.x is going to drop Java 5 support thus this would block any further update to Lucas/Solrcas (Lucene/Solr 3.4 still has Java 5 but 3.5/3.6+ will probably migrate to Java 6). What do you think? Tommaso
