cmal...@pixelzoom.com <cmal...@pixelzoom.com> wrote: > PhET's customers are the educational market, which typically lags > behind the technology curve. We only recently changed our minimum > system requirement to include Java 1.5. So I suspect that it will be > a long time (possibly years) before we change that requirement to Java > 1.6, and only once we're confident that <5% of our users are using > something earlier than Java 1.6. So requiring Java 1.6 for Piccolo > 2.0 would mean that we would be unlikely to upgrade any time soon.
Do you have those numbers for your current users? As far as I know Mac OSX on PowerPC is the only platform that doesn't have a 1.6 JDK available. That probably is a large percentage of the educational market though. > I also understand that Piccolo 2.0 will contain breaking changes. > Since we have many products that use Piccolo, breaking changes will > also slow our upgrade. > > That said... If you think it's the right thing to do, then I think you > should go for it, and require Java 1.6 for Piccolo 2.0. But we aware > that PhET is unlikely to be an early adopter of Piccolo 2.0. And > convincing PhET management that we should be involved in 2.0 > development or testing may be a tough sell. I forsee the 1.3 branch having a long lifetime, since in addition to the package name change, there will be several breaking changes in 2.0. We just need to make sure that non-breaking changes on 2.0/trunk are also merged back into the 1.3 branch. michael -- Piccolo2D Developers Group: http://groups.google.com/group/piccolo2d-dev?hl=en
