[Biojava-l] biojava and Java version

[Steve Darnell]

Hi Andreas,

In the end, we all have to make decisions that best support our users. Owning an old Mac is a tough proposition (especially a PPC in an Intel world) since the Mac culture favors OS and hardware upgrades every 2-3 years. It's easy to be left in the dust.

~Steve

Sent from my HTC Merge

-----Original Message-----
From: Andreas Prlic [andreas at sdsc.edu]
Received: Thursday, 10 May 2012, 7:08pm
To: Steve Darnell [darnells at dnastar.com]
CC: Biojava [biojava-l at lists.open-bio.org]
Subject: Re: [Biojava-l] biojava and Java version

Hi Steve,

I agree with looking forward and I usually give the EOL argument to
Java 1.5 users as well and try to convince them to upgrade, too.  In
the end Apple is to blame for putting this customer in a difficult
situation and not having the choice of an upgrade.

I am bringing this up since at the RCSB PDB we are using BioJava in a
couple of Java webstart applications and as such we are confronted
with a diverse user group.  80% of the users are on Java 1.6,  but the
rest is using a variety of newer and older versions.

Since we can't control the Java version at the user end I would prefer
to stay a bit backwards compatible as long as it does not cause pain
and move along with the bulk of users.  Removing @Override annotations
seems like an easy enough compromise for supporting 1.5 and making the
few people happy, who are still stuck with legacy hardware.

Andreas





On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Steve Darnell <darnells at dnastar.com> wrote:
> 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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