JVM 6

[Tal Liron]

JANUARY 2014

Prudence 2.0.0 will be released on January 2014. The reasons for this will be clear below.

RESTLET 2.2

The original idea was to release Prudence 2.0, and then make a 2.1 release for when Restlet 2.2 would come out in January. However, it became clear that the two releases would be too close to each other and not make much sense. Because of that, Prudence git has already moved to Restlet 2.2 (currently version M5). When Restlet 2.2 gets officially released, so will Prudence. I've so far found Restlet 2.2m5 to be entirely stable!

JVM 6

The gist of much of this announcement has to do with making JVM 6 the new minimum for the stack. Why the change?

• Restlet 2.2's most important feature for Prudence is that it now requires JVM 6, which in turn means that Jetty 8+ can now be used. This is an important upgrade that's been a long time coming. Jetty 8 promises better scalability across the board.
• Moving to JVM 6 allows many other dependencies to be upgraded, too, such as Apache HTTP Client and SLF4J. It seems that the JVM world, especially the Apache project, has finally left JVM 5 behind. At long last.
  
• So why upgrade the requirement for Sincerity, too? Because of SLF4J: the logging plugin for Sincerity is very important, and it seems odd to allow JVM 5 without logging.

So, there we go. Sincerity and Prudence will both require at least JVM 6 to run. This seems to me to be a reasonable minimum, and moreover one with clear benefits.