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Author JRE versions
sham.mash@gmail.com

2006-05-19, 8:08 am

We have in our company several applications that require JRE to work.

They have been developed by different people and some require specific
versions of Java to work correctly.

Normally the applications work well individually but sometimes, when we
need to work with some of them that require different JRE versions, we
are in trouble.

How can we deal with this problem? Why last versions of JRE are not
full compatible with the previous ones?

Greetings,

Samu

Thomas Weidenfeller

2006-05-19, 8:08 am

sham.mash@gmail.com wrote:
> We have in our company several applications that require JRE to work.
>
> They have been developed by different people and some require specific
> versions of Java to work correctly.
>
> Normally the applications work well individually but sometimes, when we
> need to work with some of them that require different JRE versions, we
> are in trouble.


You can run multiple different VMs at the same time, assuming you have
enough memory.
>
> How can we deal with this problem?


Ask your suppliers to support a particular JRE.

> Why last versions of JRE are not
> full compatible with the previous ones?


They should, but they aren't, because, for example:

- Earlier JREs have bugs which have been fixed in later JREs. And there
might be a work-around for a JRE bug in an application for an early JRE
which now clashes with the fix in the later JRE.

- Later JREs have new and improved bugs, courtesy Sun Microsystems Inc.
(Sun prefers to add new "features" instead of fixing bugs)

- Later VMs provide features not available in earlier JREs. Applications
using these features will not run on earlier JREs.

- Applications for earlier JREs might implement a missing feature which
later has been implemented in a JRE. The two implementations might crash
now.

But also, and this is common:

- An application uses an undocumented and unsupported feature of a
particular JRE. That feature might not be available in another JRE.

- An application abuses a documented feature in some specific way. That
might work by accident on one JRE, but fail on others.


If you want a more detailed answer, you need to examine each application
in detail, and figure out why it fails in conjunction with a particular JRE.

/Thomas
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