[ale] Fedora 19 and Java 7

[Michael Trausch]

API compatibility is a must on any platform. Java apps that use APIs that just happen to have not changed still work just fine. However, virtually all production, in-house apps (and many proprietary commercial ones) wind up having problems if they don't have the exact version they were built for available. 

Back when I worked at the AT&T building in Alpharetta, we had many of those apps. We had an ungodly number of different JVMs installed to support all the applications, and we were always fielding calls about "my java update broke my application".

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 4, 2013, at 10:34 AM, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:

> On 08/04/2013 08:10 AM, Michael Trausch wrote:
>> Sure it can---and it's easy if you just follow a few simple rules.
>> 
>> ELF, the native executable format, supports it. There is no reason that it
>> cannot be done in Java except that they are too lazy to do so. Interface
>> versioning makes it possible to have programs which are compiled for, say, an
>> older version of glibc to run on a modern system by preserving the old
>> function with a version tag. This does mean that security bugs in an API have
>> to be fixed in multiple versions of the API, but it is far better than the
>> alternative, which we've seen in the Java world going back to at least 1.3.
> 
> We know it can be done for Java as well. Android proves this daily when I run
> Android 1.6 programs on my 4.3 device.
> 
> Linux GUI developers need to learn about API stability too. I suspect that is
> the main reason that the year of desktop linux will never happen.
> 
> Heck, if Android can do this, why can't the GTK, Qt and other GUI library teams
> do it?  Look at what API stability has done for Android - amazing isn't it?
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