[Building Sakai] JDK 7 and Sakai 2.10

[Earle Nietzel]

Hi everyone,

Since Java 6's EOL is set for November 2012 it is time to push forward
and make Java 7 official.
(http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html)

The Maintenance/CLE Team recently discussed this and the work is
ready to be committed to sakai trunk shortly.

A new property will be introduced to the master pom and to the kernel pom:

<sakai.jdk.version>1.7</sakai.jdk.version>

So that other poms that have make use of a jdk version like the
maven-compiler-plugin will change to:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.2</version>
    <configuration>
         <source>${sakai.jdk.version}</source>
         <target>${sakai.jdk.version}</target>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Projects in sakai-trunk-all that use this plugin will be updated. Note
not all projects use the maven compiler plugin but if they declare
a parent they could inherit the config from master. For those projects
that don't they will be compiled using the jdk version they are
compiling with which is the norm.

Explicitly setting this property also serves as way to say this is the
java version that was tested and is supported for this sakai version.

Another topic was to officially support OpenJDK java versions, since
OpenJDK is open sourced it seemed like a natural fit. This also was
due to Oracle decision to remove packaging support for linux in future
versions of the JDK, which is in support of making the OpenJDK the
preferred Java for linux.

Another topic is there is no released version of JDK 7 for Mac users
only a preview at http://jdk7.java.net/macportpreview/
Because of this we may want to set the current version to 1.6 until
there is a official release of JDK 7 for Mac users and then change it
to 1.7 when its officially released.

As you can see it would be trivial to go in and set it to 1.6 or 1.7?

Any thoughts or comments?

Earle / CLE Team