[Building Sakai] Requiring JDK 7 for building/running Sakai 11?

[Cris J Holdorph]

One of the 'benefits' to requiring JDK 7, is actually in simplification. 
  Right now, to support Sakai running on both JDK 6 and JDK 7, you have 
to work around issues such as the one mentioned in KNL-1083 in two 
different JVMs.  Certain things work differently in each JVM and while 
you try to support both, you have to do extra work.  By only supporting 
one JDK, you make support easier.

Current OSX bundling of the JDK has always been a pain.  But take Sakai 
out of the picture for a moment.  Generically, if you are going to put 
up a new application on your server, would you use a base 
os/tool/library that was not going to receive security updates?  Or 
would you use a os/tool/library that was going to receive updates?  Ok, 
so you went with the one that would get updates.  Now, that doesn't 
match what is shipped out of the box with your developers Mac.  What do 
you do about it?

So yes, requiring someone to install a new JDK on their mac might be a 
barrier to using Sakai.  But requiring a system admin to use a library 
that doesn't receive support is also a barrier.  If you go the approach 
of supporting both... well that's extra effort for the project to 
support both.  Pick your poison.  But I disagree that the statement that 
there is no benefit to requiring JDK 7.

---- Cris J H

On 02/20/2014 10:13 AM, Aaron Zeckoski wrote:
> Current OSX still bundles JDK 6 by default (release from 2013-10-15).
> Lots of servers out there are still running Java 6
>
> We could require everyone who uses a Mac to figure out how to install
> a newer version in order to use Sakai but I think that is likely to
> just make people not bother and use Moodle instead. Current PHP is
> 5.5.8 (9 Jan 2014) but newest moodle 2.6.1 (13th Jan 2014) only
> requires PHP 5.3.3 (22 July 2010).
>
> Bear in mind this bug with JDK 7:
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/KNL-1083
>
> I don't see the benefit and I do see lots of negatives.
> -AZ
>
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Matthew Buckett
> <matthew.buckett at it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> I know at the moment JDK 6 is the minimum required for Sakai, does bumping
>> it up to JDK 7 (which was released July 2011) make sense for trunk (Sakai
>> 11)?
>>
>> JDK 6 from Oracle stopped getting public updated in Feb 2013.
>> The less JDKs we support the less possibility there is for cross JDK issues.
>> JDK 7 has some nice new language features:
>> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-418459.html
>>
>> JDK 7 is available in old distributions such as:
>> - Ubuntu 12.04 (released in 2012).
>> - Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 (release 2011).
>>
>> Are there places that can't run on JDK 7?
>>
>> --
>>    Matthew Buckett, VLE Developer, IT Services, University of Oxford
>>
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