Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and software development

Comments:

Now that's an interesting question when building a product. Likewise, when do you ditch support for Servlets 2.3, JSP 1.2, etc, etc? I don't think that you can, at least without forking the codebase and only providing a minimum level of support for the previous version, much like Tomcat for example.

Posted by Simon Brown on April 30, 2005 at 06:34 PM EDT #

I think the best strategy for this is to support 1.4.2 on a specific branch and then go for 1.5 on future released, and subsequently update both releases. Of course, moving to JDK 5 is probably only a good idea if you *really* need it's features - which I don't think Roller does.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 30, 2005 at 08:32 PM EDT #

If you want to move forward, at some point you have to decide that version X of your product will be the last release that supports platform Y and consequently, users who want to stick with platform Y have to remain with version X. In an open source project, the reality is that once all of a project's developers have left platform Y behind, support is essentially over. <p /> Since all of the Roller sites I'm involved with are still running JDK 1.4, I'm going to be stuck with JDK 1.4 for quite some time.

Posted by Dave Johnson on April 30, 2005 at 08:35 PM EDT #

Perhaps Roller 2.0 should use JDK 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5.x.

Posted by Anil Gangolli on May 01, 2005 at 01:59 PM EDT #

You can also use something like RetroWeaver ("http://retroweaver.sourceforge.net/") that does a partial 1.5 to 1.4 conversion. So you can in theory write everything in 1.5 for Tomcat 5.5.x and back port using retroweaver for supporting previous versions. I am not sure how good or stable retroweaver is but it can be something for you to consider

Posted by Steve Shelley on May 01, 2005 at 10:24 PM EDT #

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