

JVM 5 is the new IE6 - pdeva1
http://eblog.chrononsystems.com/jvm-5-is-the-new-ie-6

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pilif
The OP is actually quite lucky. I still have to support 1.4 installs.

But what's the worst: If you tell these IT departments to maybe update, they
tell you that updating would pose a security risk which is ridiculous when you
consider what's out there and actively targeting all JVMs younger than 1.6u27

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jl6
I would think IT departments would be more concerned with the cost of
regression testing applications with a new piece of infrastructure. Same as
with IE6. I've not come across an IT organization that wouldn't love to
upgrade to the latest piece of kit, IF their customers were willing to pay the
cost - remembering that much of the cost will be in terms of repaying
technical debt incurred by short-sighted decisions to skip best practises
(coding to standards, producing documentation, refactoring, ...)

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exDM69
More appropriate would have been to say that JVM 5 is the new MSVC6.

MSVC6 is the compiler that killed C++. It did not support many features from
the C++98 standard. Many projects were written for MSVC6 or earlier and did
not start using new language features to keep MSVC6 compatibility.

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mdaniel
I think the analogy is a little misleading, considering that the IE family is
"choose one" but the JVM permits independent installations (most JVM products
have gone so far as to just ship with the JRE bundled with their product).

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markokocic
No it's not.

At least it is not anymore officially supported by Sun/Oracle, and it hasn't
been for quite some time.

The problem with IE6 is that it was the latest MS browser for too many years.

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pdeva1
the point of the article is that, whether its supported or not, enterprises
still continue to use it. It is similar in regards to IE 6 that MS itself has
campaigns to tell enterprises to switch from IE 6
(<http://www.ie6countdown.com/>), but they still continue using it.

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melling
IE6 is still a supported product so if there are issues people can get help.
Most people in enterprise will choose a supported over unsupported product.
Actually, I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't.

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ewoodrich
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that current dynamic
JVM implementations had relatively similar performance to newer JVM versions,
so for some that use the JVM for specialized parts of the application i.e. app
engine, than wouldn't some of the changes be insignificant from a performance
standpoint?

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jigs_up
It has full backward compatibility, but does it work?

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pdeva1
yup, that is what "backward compatibility" stands for...

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jigs_up
You're right, I've never heard of backward compatibility that didn't work
flawlessly. I know very little of Java, but if the backward compatibility
isn't perfect then I could understand why companies would be hesitant to
upgrade.

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pdeva1
the java bytecodes remain unchanged from jvm 5 to 6. The bytecode is all the
jvm sees. Thus the backward compatibility does work almost perfectly. Also jvm
6 has been out for long enough now to have ironed out any potential issues if
there existed any in the first place.

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aj700
as is XP, etc.

"...is the new IE6." is the new "...is the new black."

