On 09/06/2010, Andreas Sewe <s...@st.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote: > Hi Tim, > > > > From your description it sounds like you are not so much interested in > > the implementation details of the Harmony JAR files, but you are looking > > for "compile against JARs" for a full Java SE API. Is that right? > > > > right. Unfortunately, grabbing the JARs of a full Java SE API is a lot > harder with tools like Maven than grabbing the JARs of a plain-old library. > The Sun/Oracle puts a click-through license in your way, which obviously > blocks automated build tools like Maven. And GNU Classpath is not even > distributed in binary form. It's always ./configure; make first. :-( > > The Apache Harmony distribution is much nicer in this respect. The only > thing that causes grief, besides it being not available in, say, Maven > central, is that you have dozens of JARs with no dependency information your > build tool understands (unless in OSGi-land). And manually building that > classpath "to compile against" is not fun. I've been there...
For Maven builds, one can easily define a profile which changes the compiler for builds and/or tests. One just needs to install the Harmony JDK or JRE; no messing with Maven dependencies. We use this in Apache Commons for building components that are targetted at Java 1.3 and 1.4 whilst still being able to run a version of Maven which requires 1.5+. > I hope this clarifies things. > > Andreas Sewe >
