Re: Which JVM to use under Windows?

Lew wrote:
And 1.4? Java 1.4 is entering its "end-of-life" phase - it is in hospice with only months left.

Andrew Thompson wrote:
yeah.. (shrugs) but given an app. that can easily*
be coded to support 1.4, will also support 1.5 or
1.6, why would you bother?

Lew, if the difference between releasing a 1.4 app.,
and a 1.5 app., were 10 lines of code, and a compilation option, would you *still* recommend releasing an app. intended for 'home users' as being
'1.5+'? (..just curious, really)

I recommend using Java 6 wherever feasible. The definition of "feasible" is situational. I develop for 1.4 at work.

Home users have no reason to stay at an old version of Java. I would definitely recommend to the home users that they upgrade.

As a developer, I find the differences between 1.4 and 5 to be significant - huge, really. I hate having to go back to 1.4. If there's any way to baseline at Java 5+, I insist on it.

Java has to have the slowest adoption curve of any community. Java 5 is two and a half years old already, hardly a spring chicken in IT terms. Are people still playing the same video games introduced for Xmas of '04? Much less '02, when 1.4 came out?

If a home user has Java at all, why would they use a five-year-old version? Wouldn't it be straightforward for them to upgrade to at /least/ 5?

At least the enterprise folks can manufacture an excuse - though oddly many of them are going ahead with last year's MS Office Suite and this year's .NET framework while moaning that it's too soon to upgrade from '02's (or even '00's) version of Java.

--
Lew
.

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