Hi guys,
During the last days I've started to check the changes in Voldemort 1.8.x compared with 1.6 which is the version we're using now.
The migration to Gradle is great, but I still miss the possibility to deploy the generated jars to a Maven Repository. Anyway, trying to find how to do it I was checking the different dependencies that are still not retrieved from a repository. That put me in the track to check all the dependencies and these are my findings and questions:
- JE 5.0.88: This version is not officially released by Oracle. The closet version is 5.0.97, and the newest one is the 5.0.104. Oracle is only publishing in it's Maven repository to official versions, so the version that Voldemort is using is not only not available, but it's not either oficial and not the latest one
- Azkaban-Common 0.05: This version is now legacy, not maintained anymore. Is it even used somewhere? why this old version?
- Catalina-Ant: Again an old version. Something similar can be found in Maven, but not really sure if makes sense to maintain it as a dependency. My point would be that if someone is deploying in Tomcat, this library will already be available there.
- Tehuti: Looks great, but seems to be maintained only by FelixGV. What's this library doing that cannot be done with http://metrics.dropwizard.io?
- libthrift 0.5: Again an old version. In Maven can be found 0.6.x and the latest is 0.9.1.
- Tusk: I could not even find anything about it
Also the versions that are used from apache-commons, joda and other libraries are really old. Some of those libraries include some interesting performance improvement in the newer versions.
Why are we using so many old dependencies? The only answer that comes to me is that for some reason Voldemort needs to still be compatible with Java 1.5. Is that the reason? Shouldn't we move to, at least, Java 6?
I would volunteer to attack those changes: Upgrade to Java 6, update dependencies, ..... From a code perspective, but I would need help with the performance and stability tests.
Looking forward for your comments.
Carlos.