[jdom-interest] Java 1.5 language features.

[Talden]

I should qualify this.  I say this in the context of JDOM because it's
API is highly stable and there appears to be relatively low exposure
to feature creep incurring high maintenance overhead of two versions.

Of course I'd hope that, with the Java6 release that the momentum of
developers moving to Java5 increases to the point that support for 1.4
can be given a firm end-of-life for many projects.  There are very few
arguments for staying with 1.4 as most of the tool and server vendors
have already moved to Java5.  JDOM is potentially one of those
arguments.

--
Aaron

On 2/26/07, Talden <talden at gmail.com> wrote:
> Or you release a new version with generics and introduce maintenance
> builds for the 1.4 supporting version when and if bugs need to be
> fixed.  You can't wait for an entire user.base to move on - there are
> still people using 1.1.x after all.
>
> NB: @SuppressWarnings really should be the exception rather than the
> rule (EG filling in those edge cases where Suns partial generics
> implementation shows its gaps).  I wouldn't want to have to pepper the
> code with suppression for every touch point where we use JDOM.
>
> --
> Talden
>
> On 2/26/07, Jason Hunter <jhunter at servlets.com> wrote:
> > Michael Kay wrote:
> > >> Is there any effort being placed towards introducing Java 1.5
> > >> language features into the JDOM API?
> > >
> > > I've got the same issue with Saxon. I would love to introduce generics into
> > > the API, but there are still too many users on 1.4 who can't be left behind.
> > >
> > > At the moment with Saxon I'm thinking of introducing a 1.5 API that uses
> > > generics, to sit alongside the 1.4 API. I'm also thinking of sitting it out
> > > and waiting until 1.4 is no longer a requirement. It's not easy to decide
> > > between these two options, and the same applies I'm sure to JDOM.
> >
> > Exactly.  You either drop support for Java 1.4 (that's premature I think
> > still), skip features introduced in Java 1.5 (the present course of
> > action), or produce two JARs (a potential source of subtle bugs).
> >
> > It's indeed unfortunate that the warnings are so prevalent in Java 1.5,
> > especially for code patterns that in Java 1.4 are the best code possible
> > to write.  They provided us with @SuppressWarnings, but of course that
> > requires Java 1.5.
> >
> > -jh-
> >
>