> My 'platform' is a slot loading iMac.
I guessed right then. :-) You could install MacOSX which has a decent JDK 1.3.1.
Apart from the fact that I would be making a leap of faith that all else I want to do, would be effective (id est not too slow) once I have OS X (note that it is quite hard to return to classic Mac OS), it remains a goal for my project to run on systems three years old. I feel that I should not force my customers to upgrade.
> It should be a general goal of Open Source projects to be backwardscompatible. My understanding is that it should be possible to use a tool like ant to extract a Java 1.1 subset.
Should it? To a certain extent, yes. But I think it would be best if Steve Jobs held his promise to fully support the Java2 platform even on his older systems.
You bet. I have to explain to people (or rather, explain away) why there was phraseology on the front of the mac Java page stating that the Mac was the best platform for developing java, exempli gratia, <URL: http://developer.apple.com/devnews/devnews082997.html >, "... the Mac OS is the best platform for developing Java products".
This was so out of accord with reality, that I suspect that those people thought I must be soft in the head for not being able to work miracles with Java. No doubt, the Jobs RDF is so strong that in Cupertino a dual G4 Powermac can finish an infinite loop in 7 and a half seconds allowing its users to grab the best seats for Farmer MacGregor's Flying Circus.
My point is that however undesirable, it is understandable that commercial organisations need to keep people upgrading. The reverse should be the case for OS software In our case the only issue is the cost of support, and since even niche products can be made essentially self-supporting, there should be no artifical limit established. Or do you look forward to a day when, say, vi (which is well past its use by date) in the form of its popular workalikes enter its EOL phase.
I've found a notice in the ant documentation: "For the current version of Ant, you will also need a JDK installed on your system, version 1.1 or later. A future version of Ant will require JDK 1.2 or later."
Quite so. As time goes by more and more of the good stuff becomes (in my experience) JDK 1.3 or better, and obviously each of us will reach a point when we can no longer handle older platforms or protocols. Metrowerks has recently, for example, stopped delivering 68k Assemblers and Pascal compilers with its Mac desktop products. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide what the users of these tools felt about it.
Ben.
