[Engine-devel] Revisiting Java7

[Alon Bar-Lev]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Itamar Heim" <iheim at redhat.com>
> To: "Allon Mureinik" <amureini at redhat.com>
> Cc: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 1:13:49 PM
> Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] Revisiting Java7
> 
> On 12/04/2012 11:20 AM, Allon Mureinik wrote:
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Itamar Heim" <iheim at redhat.com>
> >> To: "Allon Mureinik" <amureini at redhat.com>
> >> Cc: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>
> >> Sent: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 1:40:10 AM
> >> Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] Revisiting Java7
> >>
> >> On 12/03/2012 04:03 PM, Allon Mureinik wrote:
> >>> Hi guys,
> >>>
> >>> Earlier today, Java6 compatibility was broken
> >>> (http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/9430/).
> >>> This was picked up on pretty quickly, and easily fixed
> >>> (http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/9666/).
> >>>
> >>> However, I think this is a good opportunity to revisit our policy
> >>> towards Java 7.
> >>> Currently, we have an "odd" setup, where we recommend running a
> >>> compiling /with/ Java 7 [1] but comply to Java 6 language level
> >>> [2] and JDK [3].
> >>> Inevitably, mistakes like the that happened today will happen.
> >>>
> >>> I know we're holding back due to GWT issues, but looking forward
> >>> to
> >>> oVirt 4.0, is Java 7 on our roadmap?
> >>
> >> what was the GWT issue?
> > GWT 2.3 that we use doesn't support java 7 syntax.
> > The latest version, 2.5, doesn't either.
> > I'm not sure, however, this is a good reason to enforce the java 6
> > limitation on the entire project (including backed, rest, etc.)
> 
> i agree. you can limit it to the parts used by GWT for now.

The major advantage to move to java7 is the try-with-resources statement.

If we can do this for 3.2 it will be great. From what I understand from Allon, the only noisy change is to move the common and compat out of the backend directory into its own top-level directory, so we can apply a different maven policy on these two easily.

This way the common/compat and frontend will be built using 1.6 and backend will be built using 1.7.

Alon