Honest question: considering that Sun end-of-lifed Java 1.5 back in October 2009, what's the value in continuing to support the Java 1.4 platform in River?
I've found it to be tricky to avoid using new methods when striving for backward runtime compatibility. Extensive unit testing or static analysis are the only ways to ensure you've found all the problems, since the compiler won't help you. Googling for "-target jsr14" revealed this less-than-inspiring quote: "It is convenient, if unsupported, and the compiler generates mostly compatible bytecode in a single pass." http://twit88.com/blog/2008/08/26/java-understanding-jsr14/ Chris -----Original Message----- From: Peter Firmstone [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 5:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: sketches Yes, Java 5 language features next release. Although I'd like to find just what our core jini platform should be and compile it with -jsr14 to produce Java 1.4 bytecode from Java 5 source. In that core platform, we couldn't use any new methods or libraries not in Java 1.4, however we could use generics. So for instance the Java cdc platform can consume and provide simple services. Cheers, Peter.
