For whom is JRuby intended for? I tend to agree with what Charles said earlier, that only those who contribute code to JRuby have a say in this process. Having observed the discussion for the past few days, I noticed that most contributors are calling for move to Java 5. This seems to be a good reason for moving to Java 5 as minimum.
Besides, if the enterprises really want their 1.4.2 JRuby, they are always welcomed to pay for additional work. I could see TW or other companies jumping in to fill the gap (assuming such a demand actually exists). In fact, a dual-promotion strategy may be employed - wow them with the productivity and performance of the JRuby 1.1 release, and if they insist on staying on Java 1.4, charge them for JRuby 1.0 (with 1.1-level performance/productivity). I am all for promoting JRuby to all fields of use, but ultimately, in going after a new demography, we may be neglecting the core group of contributors. >From what I can see, all the JRuby innovations, so far, came from individual contributors. The only "enterprise" contributors are Sun and TW (and I am sure TW can charge extra for a 1.4 version of JRuby). As a compromise and assuming that I understand the current branching correctly, how about if we merge changes back to 1.0-branch, release a 1.0.1, and restart the 1.1-branch to be Java 5 only? This should give a good baseline for those who have to stay on 1.4 (and for TW and others who want to support Java 1.4). In the meantime, we can still start afresh for 1.1. I haven't followed the sources code for the past few months, so I had to make a few assumptions. I am sure that Ola can correct me on how feasibility it is to maintain JRuby 1.1-level features with a 1.0 codebase. Peter ________________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alex Durgin Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2007 5:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [jruby-dev] Java version On 7/29/07, Ola Bini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 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. There is the saying that fact trumps intuition. From this mailing list, it doesn't sound like there is much of a cry for 1.4 . What exactly is the market for JRuby? Is having the fastest and most capable Ruby implementation the end game? Maybe some sacrifices have to be made to get there. I'd like to think that most of us are here because we see that this project is headed in that direction. A lot of us are enjoying some free lunch and understand the ground rules of doing so. Projects of this sort aren't maintained for charity as they do serve the direct interests of those involved. BEA, IBM, Oracle, and anyone else is welcome to maintain support for 1.4. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
