[Biojava-l] biojava and Java version

[Steve Darnell]

Greetings,

I agree with the original BioJava3 design principles (http://biojava.org/wiki/BioJava3_Design), the first of which is "BioJava3 (BJ3) will freely incorporate features from Java 6."

Java 5 has been EOL'd since October 2009 and Java 6 EOL is scheduled for November 2012 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html). Apple stopped using PowerPC processors in 2006 and has not updated OS X 10.5 in almost a year (June 2011).

I suggest planning for the future rather than clinging to the past. There is a positive buzz with my coworkers about switching to Java 7. The language changes alone are a very welcomed improvement: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-418459.html 

* Binary Literals
* Strings in switch Statements
* The try-with-resources Statement
* Catching Multiple Exception Types and Rethrowing Exceptions with Improved Type Checking
* Underscores in Numeric Literals
* Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation
* Improved Compiler Warnings and Errors When Using Non-Reifiable Formal Parameters with Varargs Methods

I do sympathize for those who cannot upgrade from OS X 10.5 and PPC. Perhaps the SoyLatte OpenJDK 7 build for PPC may provide an acceptable solution for running BioJava3 on Leopard PPC? http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/bsd-dist/openjdk7_darwin/openjdk7-macppc-2009-12-16-b4.tar.bz2.

Best regards,
Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: biojava-l-bounces at lists.open-bio.org [mailto:biojava-l-bounces at lists.open-bio.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Prlic
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 4:51 PM
To: Biojava
Subject: [Biojava-l] biojava and Java version

Hi,

After some discussions with a user I was reminded of the issue that there are some PowerPC based OSX systems that are locked into
OSX10.5.8 . They can't upgrade their OS and they can't upgrade to Java
1.6 because none of these are available for PowerPCs. While that is not our fault, the question is if we should try to make BioJava backwards compatible towards 1.5.

Anybody out there on such a system?

Any opinions on making BioJava java 1.5 backwards compatible again?
Essentially it means a global replace all "@Override" with ""

Andreas
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