> quick informal poll. What about switching the current trunk to Java 6? > Would you be pro? Against? Don't care?
We have started only very recently to use GeoTools (and we love it!) and I'm not a contributor to this project, so I will just speak from a general experience in Java in an enterprise settings in recent years. To put it short: I would really analyze closely whether the benefits of dropping Java 5 support go beyond the "comfort" of some new Java 6 features, because such a switch is easy to do in a development setting but can cause a lot of headache when deploying. It has been more than two years that we are toying with the idea of dropping Java 5 support but we always concluded that the benefits did not outweigh the potential costs. The changes introduced in Java 5 amounted to a change of generation from a technological perspective, so we could always convinced our customers and partners to deploy it. (we still have to support integration with software running 1.4 and even 1.3 and we are doing it through a separate JVM, which is a pain, but less so than having to support pre-Java 5 in our core framework) The changes/enhancements introduced in Java 6, though significant, do not amount to such a fundamental switch IMHO. I personally would really like to see Java 6 everywhere because it is the first version with first class free/libre implementations and build harnesses (I'm thinking of OpenJDK, with no offense to the good job done by GCJ on Linux). But our strategy is to wait for Java 7, so that we can really argue that we will support only the previous version (which will then be Java 6) even though Java 5 is already EOL. For the anecdote: last month, one of our partner (a finance IT consultancy in London) had to show a proof of concept in an investment bank. We had prepared a thin layer for them on top of our framework. They had insisted that this layer would be Java 6 only (whereas our framework supports Java 5 as put above). Everything was going fine as long as they were preparing on their PCs, but when they had to deploy it on a Solaris server, ouch!, only Java 5 was installed. They were told that with luck it would take one month to have the authorizations to install Java 6. With the PoC due the next day, we of course patched the code so that it could run on Java 5, which is now what their layer supports... As for GeoTools we will probably always deploy it in environments that we control, running Java 6, so we don't care much. Although having it supporting Java 6 only could make some integration a bit harder with our other components. Just my two (euro) cents... (This post became quite long, but this is always a recurring theme. I remember also being stuck with an Apple PowerBook and a Java 6 only app and finally only Fedora PPC saved me with a slow but more or less working OpenJdk 6. So old Apple support is also an issue as another poster noted) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list Geotools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
