java 1.4 endorsed standards

[Joseph Kesselman]

On Wednesday, 04/16/2003 at 10:49 EST, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Anyway, we found one article that recommended not overriding APIs within
> Sun's JVM because Sun was far more thorough with testing and would have a
> very good idea of how the classes interact with the rest of the platform.

If you want Sun support for Xalan, use the version that they ship. But that's an old version, and I'm not sure they won't send you back to Apache for support... and the first thing we'll probably tell you to do is to upgrade to the currently supported version.

If you download from Apache you'll get the latest enhancements, the latest fixes... and, of course, the latest bugs.

The answer really comes down to which suits your own needs better. If you're going to ship your code to customers, using the version Sun supplies does simplify your life slightly. If you're concerned about performance and robustness, you may want to ship a snapshot of the Apache code so you, rather than Sun, decide when to upgrade... but then you've got to deal with explaining to folks how to install it and how it might interact with other things.

Don't forget that if you upgrade Xalan, you'll probably have to upgrade Xerces as well.


(We're delighted Sun ships Xalan with the JVM. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm less than delighted with the way they package it; the whole endorsed/extension classpath concept assumes relatively stable code, and isn't well suited to a large system such as Xalan which is under continuing development.)