[wildfly-dev] Smoothing the move from JDK 6 to 7

[David M. Lloyd]

At this point in time, I'd say just about everyone wants to move ahead 
with Java 7 syntax because let's face it: there's a lot of nice stuff in 
there.  But until now, doing so meant that projects which rely on 
running on JDK 6 until the heat-death of the universe are on a fast road 
to pain and suffering.

Well, all that ends today... introducing "seven2six" [1], a tiny tool 
(only two source files) which losslessly converts version 51.0 (1.7) 
class files to version 50.0 (1.6).

With this tool in your build, you can switch your language level to 1.7 
without alienating your 1.6 users.  I've already got this integrated 
with JBoss Modules (it's quite simple to do as the README describes).

This could end Brian's major pet peeve of rooting out diamond operator 
usage in new WildFly files, among other issues.  I want to know what you 
guys think of bringing this in to WildFly (maybe even in to 
jboss-parent, honestly).  The initial version is released to Maven 
already at org.jboss.seven2six:seven2six:1.0.Final so feel free to mess 
with it and suggest improvements (just use the GH bug tracker for now I 
guess).

Thanks to Kabir Khan for the original idea and implementation/POC (I 
just polished it up with ASM), and James Perkins for the Maven 
integration code.

[1] https://github.com/dmlloyd/seven2six
-- 
- DML