I have a library I develop (XMLC [1]) that depends on JDK1.3 and also depends on Xerces.  That said, part of the reason of depending on JDK1.3 is to stay in line with the Xerces dependency on JDK1.3.  The other reason is that JDK1.3 is free and clear of any built-in XML APIs, which allows me to include exactly the JAXP library of my choice (xml-apis.jar) without worry of compile-time binding to odd invalid APIs included in 1.4 (such as some stuff meant for the HTML2 API that got placed in the HTML1 API DOM package namespace).  But if Xerces decides to move to a later version of Java, then I will probably move XMLC right along with it.

That said, I would think that if Xerces were going to bother making a move at all it would move to JDK1.5 rather than bother with 1.4.  Xerces 2.10 is always there for 1.3 and 1.4 codebases, which should all be well into maintenance mode meaning few, if any, library changes.  Moving to 1.5 would allow Xerces to take advantage of all the new language constructs added in 1.5, as well as APIs added in 1.5 (e.g., StringBuilder -vs- StringBuffer).

So, +1 for changing JDK dependency in general, but I would prefer a move straight to JDK1.5+ skipping JDK1.4 support.  This also seems to be what a lot of Apache commons libraries are doing, so it's certainly not unprecedented.

[1] http://forge.ow2.org/projects/xmlc/


Jake

On Thu, 8 Jul 2010 11:36:07 -0400
 Michael Glavassevich <mrgla...@ca.ibm.com> wrote:


Hi all,

(including gene...@xml.apache.org on the cc list to hopefully reach a wider
audience)

We're talking again on the Xerces j-dev mailing list about dropping support
for JDK 1.3. The reason being that current builds of the XPath 2.0
processor (Eclipse PsychoPath) used by the XML Schema 1.1 implementation
require JDK 1.4. While we do have a one-off PsychoPath jar that was built
with JDK 1.3 some time ago, in order to pick up recent bug fixes in this
library we need to refresh it with the JDK 1.4 version. This would only
impact the XML Schema 1.1 enabled release for now but at some point in the
future when XML Schema 1.1 becomes stable (both spec and impl) this would
get merged into the main line.

Given the age of JDK 1.3 and that it's generally out of service my
intuition is that this upgrade would probably be okay but wanted to check
with users on their needs. Is there anyone out there still using Xerces-J
with JDK 1.3? If you are, how long into the future will you continue to do
so, and would you be willing to migrate to JDK 1.4 (or higher) to be able
to use XML Schema 1.1?

Thanks.

Michael Glavassevich
XML Parser Development
IBM Toronto Lab
E-mail: mrgla...@ca.ibm.com
E-mail: mrgla...@apache.org


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