On 15/01/15 16:15, Gilles wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jan 2015 07:52:11 -0500, Hank Grabowski wrote:
Good call, Silviu!
The most recent version of their survey of Plumbr installations (823 in
total) was May of last year, only a few months after Java 8 came out
(link
below). At that time the break down was: Java 5 at 0.4%, Java 6 at 36%,
Java 7 at 61% and Java 8 at 2.5%. I'm still looking for more data on
this,
but Rebel Labs has a similar article (not broken down by version) that
showed that 65% of development was on Java 7 by May of last year too. I
doubt the balance was Java 8 at that point, so there must be a sizable
Java
6 contingent still.
One other thing that came to mind with the new Java 8 features is how
that
is supported on Android. As far as I can tell Android KitKat, as well as
the latest release of the Android Studio and SDK Tools doesn't support
Java
8 yet. In fact, according to the Android development setup page versions
between (and including) Gingerbread and KitKat require JDK 6, not 7. I
haven't coded Android recently to know whether it does work on JDK 7
or if
is just a requirement but it is peculiar that the main instructions call
for JDK 7 installation and then the footnote specifically tells
developers
to pull a different JDK version for those earlier platforms. I can't
tell
where the Java 7 language features were added to Android before the
current
version, Lollipop. I was surprised Lollipop wasn't on their dashboard
but
according to the AppBrain statistics it accounts for far less than 1% of
the installed phones. So best case scenario would be Jelly Bean
supports 7
(no indication that's true), which means 85% of Android devices would be
covered if we set a Java 7 minimum. Next best would be KitKat (more
likely
but not according to the install instructions) which means 39%. As for
Java 5, that was needed for pre-Gingerbread Android OS which accounts for
0.5% of the market.
I guess with all of that it's clear that Java 5 is unnecessarily being
maintained at this point. Both surveys of servers and Android show far
less than 1% usage. It seems Java 6 penetration may be still be pretty
substantial, even conservatively at on the order of 25% (if Java 7 and 8
adoption picked up dramatically in 6 months after the surveys as I
imagine
it did to some extent). So it seems the most reasonable conservative
play
would be to stick with Java 6, especially if we can confirm that between
half to 85% of Android devices can't use Java 7 language features. A
more
aggressive play would be to set a requirement for Java 7. Setting the
minimum at Java 8 at this time seems overly aggressive at this time
though.
https://plumbr.eu/blog/most-popular-java-environments-in-2014
http://pages.zeroturnaround.com/Java-Tools-Technologies.html
http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html
https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
http://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-android-sdk-versions
I wonder: Isn't the "end of public updates"[1] (scheduled on April of
this year for Java 7) somehow going to change that picture a lot?
If not, why?
Regards,
Gilles
[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html
And for other JVMs:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/lifecycle/
java7 is still current -- "only" beta java8 currently AFAIK.
My experience is that there is a significant "why change what's not
broken" effect (stable systems don't upgrade software, whether
dependencies or java) so it is not only how much Java N<current is used
but also how many of those users will update software that is depending
on it.
There is no single right answer - best of luck.
Andy
On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 11:20 PM, Silviu Burcea
<silviuburcea...@gmail.com>
wrote:
I think Rebel Labs or Plumbr have some metrics about JDK usage.
On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 10:21 PM, Hank Grabowski
<h...@applieddefense.com>
wrote:
> Java 8 has only been out for less than a year. There is still a
sizable
> percentage of groups that have not converted up to Java 8 for myriad
> reasons. While I was surprised that we are requiring backwards
> compatibility with the ten year old Java 5 I think jumping all the
way to
> requiring Java 8 may be a bit too much of a stretch. I would vote
for a
> minimum required version of Java 7 with the ability to run in Java
8. I
> wish I could find metrics to quantify the penetration of each of the
JDKs,
> but my gut says Java 7 would a reasonable cutoff.
>
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Gilles <gil...@harfang.homelinux.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Raising this issue once again.
> >>> Are we going to upgrade the requirement for the next major
release?
> >>>
> >>> [ ] Java 5
> >>> [ ] Java 6
> >>> [ ] Java 7
> >>> [ ] Java 8
> >>> [ ] Java 9
> >>>
> >>
> > Counts up to now:
> >
> > Java 7 -> 2
> > Java 7 or 8 -> 2
> > Java 8 -> 2
> >
> > Any more opionions?
> >
> > Gilles
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