Hi,
So, once again, the question of which should be the minimum Java version
to run JRuby. We are currently at 1.4.2, but the proposal is to move to
5 for trunk and all major releases from now on. This does not concern
the 1.0.x-series.
I wrote a blog post about it, and got quite many replies. Almost all of
them very positive about going to 5, but there were a few that
represents my gut feel about it. Take this for example, from Jesper:
I think for a lot of users one of the most compelling aspects of JRuby
is it's ability to sneak Ruby into the enterprise. If you decide to
ditch 1.4, many enterprises will not be able to run JRuby (and Rails) on
their existing infrastructure - and these guys *don't* just upgrade.
Besides from Websphere 6 and Weblogic 9 also Oracle Application Server
10g is using 1.4.2.
For now, the cutting edge shops are running CRuby/Mongrel and in the
enterprise shops we can sneak in a little magic with JRuby. So for now,
please stay on 1.4.
I also asked on one of the internal Java discussion lists for TW, and
the results were mixed to. What was obvious was that we needed some way
to handle backwards compatibility, and retroweaver wouldn't be enough.
Further, staying on 1.0.x may not be an option either, since we're doing
substantial changes in trunk now.
I'm feeling deeply torn, especially since I know many of the features of
Java 5 will make our lives easier. Can we go the middleground?
Development and building has to be done with Java 5 or later, meaning
that the source code can contain annotations, which we can use to do
code generation with apt. We can force the resulting jars to be
1.4-compliant anyway. We could also make dual distributions, where the
5+ distribution contains real concurrency instead of the backport, and
so forth.
I don't really know how to solve this problem in a good way.
Cheers
--
Ola Bini (http://ola-bini.blogspot.com)
JRuby Core Developer
Developer, ThoughtWorks Studios (http://studios.thoughtworks.com)
"Yields falsehood when quined" yields falsehood when quined.
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