Hi All,
I remember a while back that there was quite a bit of discussion
which Java version to make the primary version supported by SAF2 and
if it's 5, then how to support 1.4. Retrotranslator was mentioned as
one of the ways to support 1.4 without having to stay source-compatible.
I'd like to say that based on recent experience I think that's an
extremely viable option. I've been trying out Retrotranslator to
make build of Stripes that works on Java 1.4. Keep in mind that
Stripes, being a new framework, was built exclusively on 1.5, and
with the explicit goal of leveraging features like annotations,
generics and varargs. It took me about 15 minutes from downloading
Retrotranslator to having a working build of Stripes[1] + the example
applications that I could run under JDK 1.4. That's just freaking
impressive!
There are some features it doesn't support, but they are mostly minor
(as far as they impact me anyway). All the annotations, and just as
importantly, generics type-guessing code works beautifully. I had to
make a couple of minor changes in Stripes (specifically changing a
couple of calls to ThreadLocal.remove() to ThreadLocale.set(null)),
and there are a couple more changes that are needed to be 100%
compatible (involving parsing of the Big* numbers).
It's clear to me though that with a little up front consideration you
could leverage as much of Java 5 as you wanted, and still produce a
JDK 1.4 binary-compatible build with ease. Hopefully this could be a
workable strategy for SAF2.
-t
[1] http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes/Java+1.4+and
+Stripes
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