I just read your posted FAQ and I think there are a lot of
misconceptions being thrown around here...
First of all, Retroweaver will warn you if you use any code which
cannot be backported to JDK 1.4. So there is no potential problem here.
Secondly, have you actually tried talking to other developers who have
used Retroweaver? I have heard absolutely no negative feedback and a lot
of positive feedback about it. Just Google Retroweaver and look for
anyone reporting problems... How could it be that many companies are
using it and even IBM featured a few articles about it but "it's not
good enough for us"?
As for IBM... I doubt IBM will ship a 1.5 JRE anytime within the next
couple of years and even once they do that, IBM Websphere will take
*another* few years to be ported to JRE 1.5.
All in all, if your requirement is that IBM Websphere runs JRE 1.5
before Wicket uses 1.5 code, we might see this happening in five years
which seems rather silly to me.
There are solid backports of JDK 1.5 to 1.4 and they prevent you from
using features which cannot be backported 100%. So really, where's this
paranoia coming from?
Gili
Martijn Dashorst wrote:
Update of /cvsroot/wicket/wicket/xdocs
In directory sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net:/tmp/cvs-serv13049/xdocs
Modified Files:
faqs.fml
Log Message:
Added Java 5 FAQ
Index: faqs.fml
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wicket/wicket/xdocs/faqs.fml,v
retrieving revision 1.4
retrieving revision 1.5
diff -C2 -d -r1.4 -r1.5
*** faqs.fml 27 Jul 2005 09:09:44 -0000 1.4
--- faqs.fml 1 Aug 2005 16:00:14 -0000 1.5
***************
*** 70,73 ****
--- 70,124 ----
</answer>
</faq>
+ <faq id="why-no-tiger">
+ <question>Why doesn't Wicket use Java 5?</question>
+ <answer>
+ <p>
+ We strive to make Wicket available for
the largest possible number of developers. This
+ means that we have to take into account
those developers that don't have the luxury of
+ running their application servers on
Java 5. Many shops don't run on Java 5 yet. We would
+ be doing ourselves and our users a
great disservice when we would target Java 5 as our
+ base platform.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ As several members of our community have pointed out, there is a code converter for
+ running Java 5 code on a Java 1.4 runtime, <a href="http://retroweaver.sf.net";>RetroWeaver</a>.
+ Even though it is a remarkable product,
and probably works flawlessly, we, the
+ Wicket core team, can't support using
such a tool on a framework. Debugging web applications
+ is already a very complex thing to do,
and when we introduce such an unknown component (or
+ to be more precise: 2 components), bug finding becomes even harder. Furthermore, some clients
+ of our users won't or can't accept such retrofitted code.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Also note that RetroWeaver only takes your sourcecode into consideration. The standard libraries,
+ which are an integral part of a Java Runtime Environment, are not backported. For instance, Wicket
+ uses the
+ <a href="http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/classes/EDU/oswego/cs/dl/util/concurrent/intro.html";>concurrent</a>
+ package of <a
href="http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl";>Doug Lea</a>. This package has been adopted
+ by the Java 5 runtime library. However
the backport of this JDK 1.5 extension is not a 1-on-1
+ drop in library that makes our code
ready for JDK 1.5. Java explicitly forbids that other than
+ the Java Runtime Library classes contribute to the
<code>java.xxx</code> namespace. So supplying
+ the backport with Wicket will
<em>not</em> solve our problem.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Please keep in mind that we <em>do</em>
see the benefits of using Java 5. We like annotations, generics,
+ autoboxing, removing the need for
concurrent.jar, etc. But we have to look at the world around us,
+ and that world is unfortunately not
using Java 5.
+ </p>
+ </answer>
+ </faq>
+ <faq id="when-tiger">
+ <question>When will Wicket use Java 5?</question>
+ <answer>
+ <p>
+ Basically the answer is: when the
majority of our customers can run the web applications on Java 5.
+ As IBM WebSphere is the leading
application server, having Java 5 support for WebSphere application
+ server is one condition.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Upgrading to Java 5 will break a lot of
stuff, so this will be scheduled for a major release. You
+ may count on it to be somewhere around
Wicket 2.0.
+ </p>
+ </answer>
+ </faq>
</part>
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