Re: Java 1.4

On Jan 23, 2012, at 11:33 AM, David Johnston wrote:

> The same kind of thinking goes toward officially supporting different JREs. Make efforts to maintain broad support - though that technically means having these releases in the buildfarm - and address the pros/cons of specific features that are desirable but that cannot be used on all flavors.

I'll toss in my 2¢ as a Postgres and Java advocate, and one-time patch submitter (which ended up getting abandoned anyway). Weigh that as you will :-)

Maintaining Java 1.4 compatibility was a significant barrier to me contributing a patch to the pg-JDBC driver. I may be spoiled, but I write 1.6 code all day every day and being forced to drop back to 1.4 (especially when you have to keep track of compatibility in your head, my machine doesn't even have a supported 1.4 install anymore, making it very hard to test well!) really adds both a psychological and a time barrier to contributing code to the driver.

As a user (and I do understand not everyone has the same values / needs), I would strongly prefer to see time spent on developing / shoring up new features and improvements (e.g. JDBC4 features) rather than maintaining support for effectively legacy JVM versions.