Java 6 (Was: Hudson build is still unstable: Tika-trunk #395)

[Jukka Zitting <jz...@adobe.com>]

Hi,

From: Paul Jakubik: 
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote:
> > I don't think the time is right yet for upgrading Tika's platform
> > requirement from Java 5 to 6.
>
> Java 6 has been out for almost 4 years (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history). When will
> it be the right time to require Java 6?

Hmm, my comment above doesn't really reflect my thinking on this too well. I'll clarify.

Basically, Java 6 doesn't offer much new functionality to libraries like Tika (its main benefits are in things like performance and stability, which are more deployment than development concerns), so the benefits of upgrading from Java 5 to 6 are fairly low. Even this particular case with NetCDF is probably just due to a missing or misdefined -target option rather than a hard dependency to some new Java 6 feature that's not available in Java 5.

Thus even if I personally wouldn't recommend anyone to be running Java 5 in production anymore, given the low cost of Java 5 support and the fact that many deployments are very conservative when it comes to JVM upgrades, it's in our best interest to keep supporting Java 5 as the base platform for now.

It looks like Java 7 (which thanks to Oracle seems to be coming out of the vaporware category) will again be a more attractive version language-wise, so I'd be inclined to stick with Java 5 until at least about 2012 and consider an upgrade directly to Java 7 in something like Tika 2.0 or 3.0.

BR,

Jukka Zitting