[WG: Production / Deploying Sakai] [Building Sakai] The Switch to Java 1.6

[Adams, David]

Peter wrote:
> Are you building your Sakai 2.5 or 2.6 instance using Java 1.6?
> Are you running your Sakai 2.5 or 2.6 instance using Java 1.6?

We are building and running exclusively with 1.5. We are waiting for the community to commit to switching, given the lack of information on how well or even if 1.6 works, before we make any serious attempts of our own.

> We'll also need to move trunk/Sakai 2.7 to Java 1.6 at some point as well.
> Any thoughts folks have on when it would be best to do this?  Perhaps sooner
> is better than later?

My vote would be for an immediate mandate for 1.6 support in everything post-2.6. Maintaining 1.5 compatibility is a good idea--IANAJD: can you configure maven to tell java to disallow any 1.6-specific features?--but I think the Sakai Project looks bad if we're still targeting 1.5 after it's been end-of-lifed. And more importantly, as a sysadmin, I feel very uncomfortable deploying a web application on an unmaintained platform.

At a bare minimum, we should be running some QA servers on 1.6 so we have some awareness of what issues exist. Given that 1.6 will probably be EOL'ed within a couple of years (http://java.sun.com/products/archive/eol.policy.html), we ought to already be doing the same for 1.7, in fact.

David Adams