Shapira, Yoav wrote:
It depends how you define support, right? Does "support" mean by default everything is configured for JDK 1.3, and Tomcat is built with target="1.3" ? Or does it means there's an easy way to set this target parameter (e.g. a build.properties setting) and build your own Tomcat for 1.3?
What is the cost of having "target=1.3" by default ? It means the class
files and the release will work with jdk1.3 - and it will also run on 1.4 or 1.5.
What is the benefit of having target=1.4 and forcing people who use 1.3 to recompile the entire tomcat ?
Stability versus featurism is much more of a judgment call IMHO. Does stability mean we stick with an old platform (JDK 1.3) and jump through hoops (e.g. runtime detection) to use newer (JDK 1.4, JDK 1.5) features? If so, then at what point does the cost (e.g. performance) become higher than the benefit (ease of use for old platform users)? It's a subjective call I think.
That's a question for Sun :-), who is forcing people to jump through the hoops by bundling all features with the VM.
Tomcat core already works with 1.3 - and you can have optional connectors/valves/etc that only work with 1.5 or 1.6 - with just a simple conditional compilation.
I understand why MSFT is forcing people to upgrade windows - they make a lot of money from that, and don't care how much the users will suffer to upgrade. But we don't gain that much by forcing people to upgrade the VM to use the latest version of tomcat. I wish Sun would sell and make money on the VM - so at least someone would gets some benefit from this forced upgrade cycle :-)
While I don't doubt the legitimacy of your pro-1.3 arguments, you just
don't see users on the mailing list with anything other than JDK 1.4.
We already get more JDK 1.5 questions than JDK 1.3 it seems, even though
1.5 is still in beta.
IMO that's because 1.3 is used in production for quite a while - so most problems are solved.
If you release the next version with 1.4 target - you may get more 1.3 questions :-)
Upgrading the VM is almost the same with upgrading the OS - there are still plenty of packages for RedHat7.3 or NT, and most of the questions are from people trying the latest OS and noticing things are breaking.
So I don't know, I'm not 100% convinced we should require JDK 1.5, and I'm not 100% convinced we should drop 1.3, I'm just in the middle ;) I'm comfortable with requiring 1.4 though, as it's been more than 2 years since JDK 1.4 was released.
I'm ok with using 1.5 features, or having a default distribution for 1.5 - as long as the code is compiled with target=1.3 ( no major harm ) and
it is possible to run the basic tomcat with 1.3 ( with some additional packages - parser, mx4j, etc ).
Costin
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