Sun JDK questions

[Ian Petersen]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 5:30 PM, William Muriithi
<william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I need some advice here. I have an JDK version 1.4 running on Sunfire
> hardware. I am planning to migrate this development environment to a
> x86_64 system. It looks like JDK version 1.4 is not supported on
> X86_64, so I will have to use JDK version 1.5.
>
> Question it, what are the possibles problem I can expect when
> attempting above considering there is some jave classes that are not
> supplied by sun on the old server? Will they work on the new setup?
>
> I am not a java developer, so the questions are a little trivial. I do
> however believe the hardware architecture difference will not be a
> problem due to java virtual machine isolating hardware. Moving classes
> from 1.4 to 1.5 is what I am not sure how it will work.  Are they
> forward compatable?

Java 1.4-compatible class files should run without change on a Java
1.5-compatible VM.  There are only two things I can think of that
might cause you problems: native libraries that are no longer
available and some kind of weird dependency on buggy behaviour in the
1.4 VM.  If the app you're moving is 100% Java (depending only on the
JRE and possibly other 100% Java libraries), you don't have to worry
about native libraries.  As for dependencies on obscure bugs in 1.4,
the only way to discover those is to run the app on a different VM and
wait for it to break (or not).

Ian
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