[Biojava-l] [Biojava-dev] Increasing Java version requirement for BioJava

[Andreas Prlic]

Based on some RCSB PDB analytics data, I'd estimate that about 2/3 of all
users are already on 1.8. However there is still a significant number of
users on 1.7 (somewhere around 1/4).

As such my vote is to upgrade to 1.7 for now and move to 1.8 at some point
in the future, when 1.7 usage has declined further.

Andreas






On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 8:56 AM, Terry Casstevens <tmc46 at cornell.edu> wrote:

> Dear Spencer,
>
> I'm the lead developer for the Tassel software, and we use the Biojava
> libraries.  We've required Java 8 for Tassel since August 2014.  If
> you change, some users will need to upgrade Java regardless.  I
> recommend going to Java 8.
>
> maizegenetics.net/tassel
>
> Best,
>
> Terry
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 7:16 AM, Spencer Bliven
> <spencer.bliven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There has been some informal discussion of increasing the Java version
> > requirement for BioJava from the current Java 6 to either 7 or 8. It
> would
> > be great to hear from the larger BioJava community about whether this
> would
> > be a welcome change or not.
> >
> > I will start the discussion by listing what I see as the pros and cons of
> > setting each version as the minimum requirement for BioJava.
> >
> > Java 6:
> > ---------
> > + Greatest backwards compatibility
> > - No updates since Feb 2013*
> > - Some dependencies are not compatible, requiring the use of older
> versions
> > (currently only log4j, but could be others in the future)
> >
> > Java 7:
> > ---------
> > + Most popular version currently
> > + Some minor language features added
> > - No updates since Apr 2015*
> >
> > Java 8:
> > ---------
> > + Tons of awesome new programming features, e.g. lambda functions
> > + Only version supported by Oracle
> > - Not available for many systems
> >
> > * Note that all versions are backwards compatible, so you can always use
> a
> > more up-to-date JDK for downstream projects. Running outdated software is
> > generally a bad idea, so users are encouraged to use the Java 8 JRE,
> > regardless of the minimum BioJava requirement.
> >
> >
> > One thing I would like to get a sense of is how many BioJava users are
> still
> > using 6 and 7. @emckee2006 mentioned on github that they still have some
> > servers on 6. I know that getting Java 8 installed on CentOS is rather
> > painful, so probably some users haven't yet updated to 8.
> >
> > Let me know if I missed anything!
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Spencer
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > biojava-dev mailing list
> > biojava-dev at mailman.open-bio.org
> > http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-dev
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>



-- 
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Dr. Andreas Prlic
RCSB PDB Protein Data Bank
Technical & Scientific Team Lead
University of California, San Diego

Editor Software Section
PLOS Computational Biology

BioJava Project Lead
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