[NEW ISSUE] Specification should require JDK 1.5 or above.

TITLE: Specification should require JDK 1.5 or above.

TARGET: Java CAA

DESCRIPTION:

The current specifications are not particularly clear as to which Java versions the specification supports. The only statement regarding Java version is in the introduction which includes the following paragraph.

This document defines implementation metadata using the annotation capability from JavaTM 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5. However, SCA also allows service clients and implementations to be written using J2SE 1.4. All metadata that is represented by annotations can also be expressed using a component type side file, as defined in the SCA Assembly Specification [ASSEMBLY].

This implies that SCA can be used on JDK 1.4 and JDK 1.5. This is not really true because:

· Many of the classes in the SCA-J API define annotations

· Many of the key classes in the SCA-J API use generics - e.g. ComponentContext, ServiceReference, RequestContext, etc

As a result, the SCA-J API must be compiled with JDK 1.5 or above. This means that the SCA-J API cannot be used on JDK 1.4 since it cannot use JDK 1.5 compiled classes.

It would be possible to compile using JDK 1.4 the subset of the SCA-J API that does not use annotations or generics. This would be of little use since it would just contain the Exceptions and Constants classes. This seems to be of practical use.

Also, JDK 1.4 has reached its end of service life (30th October 2008) and is no longer supported by Sun. Sun encourages it's customers to update from JDK 1.4 to JDK 1.5 or above.

PROPOSAL:

Outline - Drop support for JDK 1.4 and require JDK 1.5 or above.

Replace the second sentence of the last paragraph of the introduction of CAA with the following text:

This means that SCA service clients and implementations MUST be written using JavaTM 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5 or above.

Note for the editors: When copying this back into the specification; watch out for the JavaTM as the TM has lost its superscript formatting.

For reference, the old paragraph was:

The proposed new paragraph is:

This document defines implementation metadata using the annotation capability from JavaTM 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5. This means that SCA service clients and implementations MUST be written using JavaTM 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5 or above. All metadata that is represented by annotations can also be expressed using a component type side file, as defined in the SCA Assembly Specification [ASSEMBLY].

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