Hi Andy,
I've tested Retrotranslator today, and it gives quite good results. I've been able to
run all of our JUnit test cases but one with the translated JDK 1.4 jars.
Moreover, Retrotranslator provides a nice maven plug-in that integrates pretty well
in the project life cycle. The verification you recommended is also automated with
the plug-in.
At this time, there are a few warnings coming from Retrotranslator. They are all
directed to javax.management and other JMX related classes. Everything else in
logback translates fine. As far as I know, the project that logback depends on should
also run under JDK 1.4, but I cannot promise anything about that.
If you want to give a try to the JDK 1.4 jars, you'll need to checkout the project
from the repository and run the process-classes phase. Additionally, you will need to
setup a variable to the JDK 1.4's rt.jar file in your maven_home/conf/settings.xml.
See the parent pom for a comment about this variable.
We'll run more tests with the translated jars. Unless we find something bad, the next
release will contain a jdk14 directory with the translated jars.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Cheers,
Sébastien
Gerweck Andy - agerwe wrote:
Personally, I have had excellent luck using Retroweaver
[http://retroweaver.sourceforge.net/] to back-convert my Java 5 code for
deployment on earlier JVM runtimes. Retroweaver can handle *every*
linguistic feature from Java 5. (Most of the linguistic changes in Java
5, even generics, have almost no incompatible effects on the compiled
bytecode.) You feed it classes compiled with Java 5 and it spits out
classes that will work on earlier JVMs. It requires only that you add a
small JAR to your classpath.
It also combines with the backport-util-concurrent project
[http://dcl.mathcs.emory.edu/util/backport-util-concurrent/] to handle
java.util.concurrent, Java 5's biggest library enhancement.
Except where Java 5 adds new methods (e.g., String.format(...)) to old
classes, Retroweaver can handle almost any Java 5 program. I put some
back-compiled code through our QA department, which could find no
performance or functionality problems.
I *strongly* recommend you put in the slight extra effort to run
Retroweaver's library-check utility. Point it to your JRE libraries and
it will go through the code to ensure it doesn't try to use any methods
or classes not available in your JRE (make sure to include the
Retroweaver runtime JAR). This will catch those library changes I
mentioned that Retroweaver doesn't handle--which is much better than a
missing class or method at runtime. If you pass this test, you shouldn't
have any problems.
I have no affiliation with Retroweaver, though I did submit a patch to
the backport-util-concurrent project. I make no claims that it'll work
for you, but I'd bet you could run through the LOGBack JAR and get it
running on JDK 1.4. If you do, you may want to share your work. Just
feed in the LOGBack JARs you need and use the output instead of the
original.
Andy Gerweck
Software Engineer
PS: In good conscience, I can't help but recommend you upgrade to Java 5
or higher if at all possible. We're reaching the point where it's bad
practice and poor style not to use Java 5's important language
enhancements. There are also great runtime advantages, so it's not
advisable to force a runtime upgrade where possible.
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