Phex was built on Java to make it portable to all systems. For platforms that are not as popular we know what kind of asset Java has been for us.

Version 3.0 breaks this by supporting jvms which are only available for four platforms. That's right. If you go to the sun.com site you will see that there are only four platforms available to download Java on.

Your efforts have been sabotaged (even if not purposely). To solve this problem please make 2.8 final bug-fix versions available to download and keep working on 2.8.x mainly for bug fixes.

I was going to say please scrap 3.0.x but on second thought I don't think I can convince people of that.

Perhaps this is inappropriate but I, too, am plauged by the rush to always be using the very latest announced developments when creating much of anything, much less stuff that is intended to be cross platform. I see it more as an issue generated by the pressure on vendors to always be turning higher and higher profits than a matter of "unpopular" systems, forcing users to be on a constant spending spree to "upgrade".

Well I can understand your displeasure.
I personally think the move to Java 5 was something we haven't done too quickly. Java 5 is released since 2004 and we already liked to switch in 2005, to be able to use some of the really useful new features. But we waited 2 additional years and I think during that time we had about less then 2% of Phex users which still used Java 1.4, everybody else was already on a higher VM even if not required. I think we even had more users with Java 6 then Java 1.4.
A additional reason was that for our very small development team it is important to prevent spending too much time working around missing 1.4 features and focus more on developing new Phex features and bug fixes. Also it is impossible for such a small team to maintain two development lines for 1.4 and 5 without additional developers (you like to join in?).

Even today Java 6 (released 7 months ago) would offer us a great amount of improvement we would love to integrate. We already have around 40% Java 6 users. But I guess we have to wait additional 2 years... and users would need to wait too.

I know Phex 2.8 is very buggy and I apologize for it, but currently there are just no resources to go back and fix these things... but if anyone with Java knowledge likes to help out, you are very welcome and of course you get all our help to find and fix these problem areas.

Gregor

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