-1 Peter Firmstone.
I could vote +1 to dropping support (us fixing something to work around
a Java 5 only bug) due to the resources of our small team, leaving the
door open to the community to contribute patches, but not compatibility
I'm afraid, I just haven't seen a good reason why we need to make River
incompatible with Java 5.
Is there a feature we need in the platform that requires Java 6?
Are we adding a feature to a proxy that requires Java 6?
I don't think a service implementation (server side) is a good enough
reason to drop compatibility.
That doesn't mean that we can't produce a service implementation that
does require Java 6 as a minimum and release it as a separate concern,
just that it's unreasonable to expect everything else to be dragged
along with it.
Note: The QA Test suite requires JDK1.6 to compile, because some of it's
tests depend on internal Sun Java platform implementation details. The
QA harness is compatible with earlier versions of Java. The jtreg tests
require Java 5, due to some tests relying on internal Sun Java platform
implementation details.
I recommend people use Java 6 if they can, but not everyone is that lucky.
I understand the reasons for making such decisions, but I think we need
to further investigate breaking the codebase up into smaller easier to
maintain components, then determining the requirements of each before
decisions like this are made. We have too much coupling between
implementation and platform at present.
Peter.
