Re: [Jmol-developers] which versions of java do we support

[mth <mt...@mt...>]

Egon,

As you probably know Sun developed a product called the Java Plug-in. The=
y
developed it to get around political issues with Microsoft and to allow
deployment of newer Java applets on older browsers. This plug-in gives yo=
u
access to the latest jvm on older browsers.

http://java.sun.com/products/plugin

Now the bad news
 - the plug-in needs to be installed on the client.
 + Fortunately, there is an automated installation scheme under IE
 - HTML pages need to be modified to specify the plugin ... yuck
 + For those who have a lot of HTML pages, Sun has an automated tool
   to modify HTML pages to specify the java plug-in

I have no idea what the profile of jmol user community looks like and wha=
t
versions of browsers they are using. So I may be out of line. But I'll
make a rather bold proposal:
 - we release version 5 with the jvm support that you indicated.
 - after version 5, we require jvm 1.3 or higher for both the
   application and the applet
 - those who wish to take advantage of the latest jmol features
   are encouraged to upgrade their browser
 - those who *need* to run the latest version of jmol on older browsers
   can install the Java Plug-in and modify their html pages to specify
   the plug-in

> On Saturday 16 November 2002 02:17, mth wrote:
>> Which versions of Java do we officially support?
>>
>> There are some places in the display code which explicitly test for
>> version >=3D 1.2. In other places, calls are made which assume >=3D 1.=
2.
>>
>> Also, I got tired of seeing the "DEPRECATED -
>> setBackingStoreEnabled(...)" when compile Jmol.java. So I took a look
>> to see what it was referring to. It *is* deprecated, but only as of
>> 1.3.
>>
>> What Java versions are people using and what is our stance?
>
> For the application we can use 1.3 or higher... But for the applet this
> is  different... Older browsers do not have a JVM above 1.1.x ...
> therefore, the  classes required for the applet may not use newer Java
> stuff...
>
> And this is actually an remaining issue in the Jmol 5 version...
> somewhere Vector.clear() is used, and IE 5.0 does not support that
> because of the older  JVM...
>
> Egon


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