Hi Andy, I've tested Retrotranslator today, and it gives quite good results. I've been able to run all of our JUnit test cases but one with the translated JDK 1.4 jars. Moreover, Retrotranslator provides a nice maven plug-in that integrates pretty well in the project life cycle. The verification you recommended is also automated with the plug-in. At this time, there are a few warnings coming from Retrotranslator. They are all directed to javax.management and other JMX related classes. Everything else in logback translates fine. As far as I know, the project that logback depends on should also run under JDK 1.4, but I cannot promise anything about that. If you want to give a try to the JDK 1.4 jars, you'll need to checkout the project from the repository and run the process-classes phase. Additionally, you will need to setup a variable to the JDK 1.4's rt.jar file in your maven_home/conf/settings.xml. See the parent pom for a comment about this variable. We'll run more tests with the translated jars. Unless we find something bad, the next release will contain a jdk14 directory with the translated jars. Thanks for the suggestion! Cheers, Sébastien Gerweck Andy - agerwe wrote:
Personally, I have had excellent luck using Retroweaver [http://retroweaver.sourceforge.net/] to back-convert my Java 5 code for deployment on earlier JVM runtimes. Retroweaver can handle *every* linguistic feature from Java 5. (Most of the linguistic changes in Java 5, even generics, have almost no incompatible effects on the compiled bytecode.) You feed it classes compiled with Java 5 and it spits out classes that will work on earlier JVMs. It requires only that you add a small JAR to your classpath.
It also combines with the backport-util-concurrent project [http://dcl.mathcs.emory.edu/util/backport-util-concurrent/] to handle java.util.concurrent, Java 5's biggest library enhancement.
Except where Java 5 adds new methods (e.g., String.format(...)) to old classes, Retroweaver can handle almost any Java 5 program. I put some back-compiled code through our QA department, which could find no performance or functionality problems.
I *strongly* recommend you put in the slight extra effort to run Retroweaver's library-check utility. Point it to your JRE libraries and it will go through the code to ensure it doesn't try to use any methods or classes not available in your JRE (make sure to include the Retroweaver runtime JAR). This will catch those library changes I mentioned that Retroweaver doesn't handle--which is much better than a missing class or method at runtime. If you pass this test, you shouldn't have any problems.
I have no affiliation with Retroweaver, though I did submit a patch to the backport-util-concurrent project. I make no claims that it'll work for you, but I'd bet you could run through the LOGBack JAR and get it running on JDK 1.4. If you do, you may want to share your work. Just feed in the LOGBack JARs you need and use the output instead of the original.
Andy Gerweck Software Engineer
PS: In good conscience, I can't help but recommend you upgrade to Java 5 or higher if at all possible. We're reaching the point where it's bad practice and poor style not to use Java 5's important language enhancements. There are also great runtime advantages, so it's not advisable to force a runtime upgrade where possible. *************************************************************************** The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged.
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-- Sébastien Pennec sebastien@qos.ch Logback: The reliable, generic, fast and flexible logging framework for Java. http://logback.qos.ch/