Does anybody really need Java 1.4 support anymore? Â RSTA is one of the few remaining, active Swing libraries that supports this ancient version of Java. Â It reached its EOL in 2008Â (almost 5 years ago!), and even its extended support ended in February 2013. Â Being a syntax highlighting text component, there hasn’t really been anything added to the JDK from Java 5 onward that would benefit it, so I’ve been keeping its minimum JRE version back at 1.4, just to keep it as “compatible” as possible. Â However, there are a few drawbacks because of this:
- There is one API change in the JDK that occurred between Java 1.4.2 and 1.5 that affects RSTA.  The code in the repository builds cleanly when built with a true 1.4 JDK, but you will receive an error for XmlParser.java when building with Java 5+ (even if you set -source 1.4).  When building RSTA with the included Ant build scripts, you will get a big fat explanation of this spit to stdout, so you know rectify the situation if it happens to you (just add a throws-clause to a single method), but Java novices may not fully understand what’s not working.  Moving the bar up to 1.5 will clean this issue up entirely.
- For JavaScript code completion, RSTALanguageSupport has a dependency on Mozilla Rhino, which is developed with Java 5 but offers a 1.4-supporting version, I believe using Retroweaver. Â While this is fine and dandy, and everything works, a future version of Rhino may well not include a pre-built 1.4-compliant Rhino jar, and I certainly don’t want to be in the business of building and supporting it myself. Â It would be a little nicer if this nuance weren’t there.
- One area where the JDK does offer nice new functionality for an editor like RSTA is XML parsing. Â We could add schema-based squiggle underline validation to XML files.
- It would be a little nice to modernize the code base.
If anyone feels strongly that we should keep releasing pre-built versions of RSTA that run on Java 1.4, please let me know, preferably in the forums.