[Biojava-l] [Biojava-dev] Increasing Java version requirement for BioJava

[Jose Duarte]

Thanks Spencer for the nice summary!

I'm going to give my vote to 1.8, because of all the new features and
because I think we really need to move forward in this one.

I would be in any case ready to compromise in 1.7 if we see that 1.8 will
really cut off a significant amount of users. With the condition that the
next release will then go to 1.8.

The only thing I feel strongly against is staying in 1.6. Whatever we do we
should avoid that.

Jose


On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 10:06 AM, Andreas Prlic <andreas at sdsc.edu> wrote:

> Based on some RCSB PDB analytics data, I'd estimate that about 2/3 of all
> users are already on 1.8. However there is still a significant number of
> users on 1.7 (somewhere around 1/4).
>
> As such my vote is to upgrade to 1.7 for now and move to 1.8 at some point
> in the future, when 1.7 usage has declined further.
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 8:56 AM, Terry Casstevens <tmc46 at cornell.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Spencer,
>>
>> I'm the lead developer for the Tassel software, and we use the Biojava
>> libraries.  We've required Java 8 for Tassel since August 2014.  If
>> you change, some users will need to upgrade Java regardless.  I
>> recommend going to Java 8.
>>
>> maizegenetics.net/tassel
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Terry
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 7:16 AM, Spencer Bliven
>> <spencer.bliven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > There has been some informal discussion of increasing the Java version
>> > requirement for BioJava from the current Java 6 to either 7 or 8. It
>> would
>> > be great to hear from the larger BioJava community about whether this
>> would
>> > be a welcome change or not.
>> >
>> > I will start the discussion by listing what I see as the pros and cons
>> of
>> > setting each version as the minimum requirement for BioJava.
>> >
>> > Java 6:
>> > ---------
>> > + Greatest backwards compatibility
>> > - No updates since Feb 2013*
>> > - Some dependencies are not compatible, requiring the use of older
>> versions
>> > (currently only log4j, but could be others in the future)
>> >
>> > Java 7:
>> > ---------
>> > + Most popular version currently
>> > + Some minor language features added
>> > - No updates since Apr 2015*
>> >
>> > Java 8:
>> > ---------
>> > + Tons of awesome new programming features, e.g. lambda functions
>> > + Only version supported by Oracle
>> > - Not available for many systems
>> >
>> > * Note that all versions are backwards compatible, so you can always
>> use a
>> > more up-to-date JDK for downstream projects. Running outdated software
>> is
>> > generally a bad idea, so users are encouraged to use the Java 8 JRE,
>> > regardless of the minimum BioJava requirement.
>> >
>> >
>> > One thing I would like to get a sense of is how many BioJava users are
>> still
>> > using 6 and 7. @emckee2006 mentioned on github that they still have some
>> > servers on 6. I know that getting Java 8 installed on CentOS is rather
>> > painful, so probably some users haven't yet updated to 8.
>> >
>> > Let me know if I missed anything!
>> >
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > Spencer
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > biojava-dev mailing list
>> > biojava-dev at mailman.open-bio.org
>> > http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-dev
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. Andreas Prlic
> RCSB PDB Protein Data Bank
> Technical & Scientific Team Lead
> University of California, San Diego
>
> Editor Software Section
> PLOS Computational Biology
>
> BioJava Project Lead
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>
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