It has been brought to my attention that some members of the Tomcat
community have expressed a desire to see a requirement lower than J2SE
1.4 in JSP 2.0.
First, let me reassure you that the JSP 2.0 specification is not final.
Actually, we are in Proposed Final Draft phase, and we are explicitly
soliciting feedback! Early feedback is always much appreciated. As per
the cover of the specification, the appropriate forum for feedback is
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Regarding the J2SE 1.4 requirement, the expert group discussed the topic
in early August (as issue "[OTH-17] J2SE Version Requirement") and there
was concensus from the different experts, but the EG is open to
additional comments. You can send mail directly to
[EMAIL PROTECTED], or, maybe better in this case, talk
directly to the Apache representatives to the Expert Group: Ricardo
Rocha ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and Geir Magnusson Jr. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
In general the more feedback the rep has from his community the better
for the Expert Group.
For what it's worth, the only technical reasons we require J2SE 1.4 are:
1. We require support for JSR-45 (Debugging Support for Other
Languages)
2. We declare support for Unicode 3.0 in our I18N chapter.
Actually, JSR-45 is quite important for the platform as a whole. For
example, it was recently pointed out to me that there's a bug report
against Tomcat 5 because we didn't re-implement the pseudo-debug
comments that Jasper 1 used to create, and that some tools relied on.
Standard debugging annotations is an important enabler, and it would be
a shame to have to wait even longer for it.
From my perspective, the most significant reason to require J2SE 1.4 is
that it would be best if people can write portable tag handlers that
utilize J2SE 1.4 libraries, and be able to use them in any JSP 2.0
application. Do we really want to stagnate on J2SE 1.2 APIs forever?
I've compiled a list of new features in J2SE 1.3 and J2SE 1.4 that I
believe would be of use to page authors and tag library developers that
would decide to use JSP 2.0. It would be awesome, IMHO, if page authors
and tag library developers could rely on these features being present in
any JSP 2.0 compliant container. This list was also discussed in the
Expert Group.
J2SE 1.3 adds (among other features):
* Built-in JNDI
* RMI/IIOP
* CORBA ORB
* PNG support (for image taglibs)
* Various Security enhancements
* Improved socket support
* HTTP 1.1 client-side support
* DynamicProxy
* Serialization enhancements
* Collections enhancements
* BigDecimal and BigInteger enhancements
* StrictMath
* Timer API
* Delete-on-close mode for opening zip and jar files
* JPDA tool support
J2SE 1.4 adds (among other features):
* XML Processing
* New I/O APIs
* Security: Java Cryptography integrated
* Security: GSS-API, Certification Path API
* Pluggable Image I/O framework
* Print Service API
* Standard Logging APIs
* Long-term Persistence of JavaBeans
* JDBC 3.0
* Assertions
* Preferences API
* Chained Exception Facility
* IPv6 Networking Support
* JNDI enhancements
* CORBA ORB with POA
* *** JSR-45 (Debugging Support for Other Languages) ***
* *** Unicode 3.0 ***
* Currency class
* Collections Framework enhancements
* Built-in support for Regular Expressions
Regards,
--
Mark Roth, Java Software
JSP 2.0 Specification Co-Lead
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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