Bug 340310

Description Rüdiger Herrmann 2011-03-17 09:28:27 EDT

RWT currently requires J2SE-1.4 as its minimum required execution environment. This requirement comes from the compatibility to SWT which also requires 1.4 as its execution environment.
The most common usage scenario of RWT is to run with the workbench which in turn requires OSGi to be present. In 3.7 Equinox OSGi raised the bar and requires J2SE-1.5 as its minimum execution environment (see the MANFIEST of org.eclipse.osgi), meaning that users of RWT+OSGi will have to upgrade to Java 1.5 anyway. 
This would leave users of RWT standalone which - in theory - would have to upgrade to Java 1.5 just because RWT changes its requirements. As current servlet engines (Tomcat 6, Jetty 6) already require Java 1.5, I doubt that there is any application out that currently relies on Java 1.4.

In my opinion the advantages by far outweigh possible migration efforts. A number of new possibilities would arise from upgrading the execution environment - to name just a few:
* make use of new concurrency APIs, e.g more finegrained locks like ReadWriteLock
* use annotations, e.g. @SuppressWarnings
* make use of the Servlet API 3.0 (if applicable/advantageous)
* make use of generics, e.g. RWTContext
* be able to more easily integrate Mockito and/or JUnit 4 for unit tests (if desired)
* ...