While looking into the solutions available for supporting database persistence for resources we discovered that the best solution was the Java Persistence API (JPA). This approach requires the least demands on the service developer while providing a highly performant, standard solution that is acceptable under the apache license. However, JPA requires java 5 because it is based on annotations. As a result, we started to consider the costs and benefits of moving the java ws core to Java 5. This email should outline these costs and benefits and, hopefully, justify moving the java ws core to Java 5. Let's start with the costs of migrating to Java 5.
Cost: - Upgrade to JDK 1.5. A version available for all platforms supported by Globus - Changes to language specification. Developers need to change use of enum as variable name. Benefits: - Allow use of JPA - Annotations and -javaagent may be leveraged by Java WS Core to improve service development usability through bytecode enhancement - Other features useful for cleaner code: Generics, java.util.concurrency, JAXP improvements, static imports, enhanced for loop A more in depth discussion of the costs and benefits is available here: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~ranantha/java5Upgrade.txt. Finally, since Java 6 has been out for quite a while and Java 7 is in the works, this seems like an appropriate time to upgrade to Java 5. It has been well tested and supported. It could make developing services for the Java WS-Core a more pleasant experience. Please provide comments, concerns and questions. Thanks, Tom
