Re: prevalence of different JVM versions

From:

Lew <lew@lewscanon.nospam>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.help,comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:29:47 -0400

Message-ID:

<ae-dnSpDYtShWzfbnZ2dnUVZ_tKinZ2d@comcast.com>

Dawid Michalczyk wrote:

kcwong wrote:

On Jul 27, 9:34 am, Dawid Michalczyk <d...@eonworks.com> wrote:

I was wondering if there are any stats online on the prevalence of the
different JVMs that regular internet users have installed on their
computers. It is my understanding that Java 1.1 is no longer the most
widely available. Thanks.

Depends on where you look... in corporate environments, they have
those expensive but old servers from Sun, IBM or other vendors. If the
official word is that newer JVMs are not officially supported,
companies will play safe and not upgrade.

But I assume you're talking about normal users... which I have no
data. I *guess* people just use whatever they've already installed,
until they are required to upgrade or they can't use a certain piece
of Java software.

Well, I'm asking about this because a couple years ago I started writing
an online game in Java 1.1 as that was still the most widely used
version of Java on windows PCs. The game is a hobby project and I work
on it on and off when I have the time. But since some things are much
easier accomplished in Java 1.3 I was wondering if I now could start
using 1.3 features without loosing too much audience.

Java 1.3 is obsolete. Sun pulled support for it several months ago. Java 1.4
is in its "End-of-Life" process already, on the road to not being supported in
the next several months or a year. Java 5 is already one version back. The
current version is Java 6, out since last year.

I wouldn't suggest using an unsupported, obsolete platform for a new product.

--
Lew