not just in proprietary hardware... There's a whole dark world of pre-1.5 VMs out there, that are stuck in the non-generic world and are either impossible or extremely difficult to upgrade (which kind of makes a mockery of Suns efforts for binary backwards compatibility..)
Case in point a certain organisation I'm aware off that have a highly customised version of a certain CRM that was popular a few years ago (and still is). the CRM was deployed on JDK 1.3 & weblogic 6 (even though the core was implemented in native code), since other apps needed to know about customers and were written using EJB, soon there was vicious cycle of binary dependencies introduced on the 1.3 platform, made worse by some really *smart* static initialisation code that relied on classloader semantics that changed in 1.5, so now there's a little web of applications that are bound together to a common obsolete platform tighter than dotnet to windows. the only way out is to replace the CRM wholesale and refactor the other applications. This is just one example, but I'm sure there are plenty of enterprise applications pumped out during the great EJB age that are tightly coupled to old versions of java for similar reasons. So the funny thing to me, is that unless i'm missing something, all the effort that Sun went to trying to keep backwards compatibility was all for nowt, as there's plenty of other factors that bind applications to pre-1.5, that can't be resolved trivially. It usually requires a fair bit of rework (for any serious enterprisey system thats using all those good sun blueprints), along with a full rebuild, which gets us back to source-level compatibility (IMHO a very good thing!), and binary compatibility is lost. Granted thats a worst case scenario, but I don't think it's all that uncommon... btw, I'm listening through the old episodes atm as well, a lot of them are pure gold and well worth it, even though a lot of the news items are a bit outdated. like what ever happened to Semplice? 2008/9/30 Bill K <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I am still listening a few episodes back and the Posse asked about > people on old java versions. I couldn't find a thread (browsed back 5 > or 6 pages... I'm sure there is one somewhere) so thought I'd just > mention some of my experiences. > > A couple years ago I was working for Aglient on a digital spectrum > analyzer (looks a lot like an o-scope). It's OS was an old version of > redhat, and it ran Java 1.0.3. Everything on the "Tube" was drawn > with AWT (including the waveform). I believe the holdup was that it > was using a cheap CPU (I want to say ARM) and they didn't have any > other VM that would run on it. > > They even back-ported swing to run on it, found it to be too slow and > undid it--speed was always an issue. > > Right now I'm working on Cable boxes. There is a standard called OCAP > (Open Cable Application Platform) that specifies that Java will be > used to write programs that run on your cable box. (Since you can > google OCAP, I don't think I'm letting out any secrets.) > > Sun is involved, and I believe they forced the standard up into 1.3 or > 1.4, before that I think it was sub-1.1. I say "I think" because many > of the older boxes won't run a full ocap stack and so there is a > process to code a 1.0.x java stack to be able to meet as many ocap > standards as possible so that it will be able to run some of the > apps. (and of course that's the part I'm working on) > > In other words, there is a good chance that a pre-1.5 JVM will be > running in YOUR house soon (or already is, this is already deployed in > many boxes). > > I would also guess just from this fact that the total number of Java > 5.0 (1.5) systems deployed would have trouble matching the number of > pre-1.5 deployments. > > Not only is pre 1.5 still in use, but depending on the type of work > you do there is a chance that YOU may be one of the pre 1.5 users in > the future. > > Oh, also. A few years ago I worked for a company that made network > management platforms--they had a custom application stack (made from > off the shelf components and a lot of their own middle-ware). I > understand they sold something to Dell, and at one point all(?) Dell > servers were shipping with this platform as part of the base system. > They were 1.4.x last time I checked, and were stuck for some reason (I > believe it was an outdated J2EE server they couldn't easily replace). > > I am not that unique, the only difference I can see is that I have > generally worked for large companies that are hardware manufacturers-- > It's not that the stuff is always embedded, Most of my work has been > applications-- I think it's that they tend to be a little more careful > about upgrading and more likely to stick with something that works. > > Although I've done internal development in the latest java version, > I've yet (in 10+ years of Java work) to use 1.5+ on anything that was > expected to be released/shipped. > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. 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