RE: Dropping JDK 1.2 support for Xerces-J (and possibly JDK 1.3? 1.4? in the future)

Before Advancing beyond 1.3 I’d suggest to maybe initiate a usage poll analogous to http://wiki.apache.org/xmlgraphics/UserPollOct2007 to get an overview which JDK version is still in use and required by Xerces-J users.

That would give the community a foundation to base a good decision upon.

Hi all,

(including general@... on the cc list to hopefully reach a wider audience)

I would like to propose that we officially drop support for JDK 1.2 in the next release of Xerces-J. Though the documentation [1] states that Xerces supports JDK 1.2 it has been years since we have built or tested binaries with this level. All of the recent releases were built and tested with JDK 1.3. It was brought to my attention that the code [2] since at least 2006 has had a dependency on APIs introduced in JDK 1.3. So we inadvertently moved on awhile ago. It seems this has not been a practical issue for most users since we've received no posts on these lists about it and received no other bug reports. It's not clear that there would be much benefit in restoring JDK 1.2 compatibility at this point. It's been out of service for years and looking around Apache it seems most projects run on JDK 1.4 or higher with some of the stragglers [3][4] below that moving up soon.

If you have serious concerns regarding Xerces abandoning JDK 1.2 support please send an email to the j-dev@... mailing list, specifying why you can't use a higher level of JDK and what parser features you are using.

While on the subject I wonder what the community would think of us eventually dropping support for JDK 1.3 and possibly 1.4. There were features introduced in JDK 1.4 and 5 which Xerces could benefit from (e.g. NIO, java.lang.CharSequence, exception chaining, java.lang.StringBuilder, java.util.concurrent.*, etc...). That's not something I'm proposing today (or thinking of proposing for awhile) but would like to hear feedback from users (please send to j-dev@...) who may still need new versions of Xerces which run on JDK 1.3 and 1.4. It would also be nice hear from folks who've long since moved on to Java 5 and beyond and would like to see Xerces take advantage of JDK 1.4 and 5 features.

Thanks.

[1] http://xerces.apache.org/xerces2-j/faq-general.html#faq-11
[2] http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XERCESJ-1297
[3] http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=122596549809889&w=2
[4] http://marc.info/?l=fop-user&m=119244442600564&w=2

Michael Glavassevich
XML Parser Development
IBM Toronto Lab
E-mail: mrglavas@...
E-mail: mrglavas@...

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