Good call, Silviu! The most recent version of their survey of Plumbr installations (823 in total) was May of last year, only a few months after Java 8 came out (link below). At that time the break down was: Java 5 at 0.4%, Java 6 at 36%, Java 7 at 61% and Java 8 at 2.5%. I'm still looking for more data on this, but Rebel Labs has a similar article (not broken down by version) that showed that 65% of development was on Java 7 by May of last year too. I doubt the balance was Java 8 at that point, so there must be a sizable Java 6 contingent still.
One other thing that came to mind with the new Java 8 features is how that is supported on Android. As far as I can tell Android KitKat, as well as the latest release of the Android Studio and SDK Tools doesn't support Java 8 yet. In fact, according to the Android development setup page versions between (and including) Gingerbread and KitKat require JDK 6, not 7. I haven't coded Android recently to know whether it does work on JDK 7 or if is just a requirement but it is peculiar that the main instructions call for JDK 7 installation and then the footnote specifically tells developers to pull a different JDK version for those earlier platforms. I can't tell where the Java 7 language features were added to Android before the current version, Lollipop. I was surprised Lollipop wasn't on their dashboard but according to the AppBrain statistics it accounts for far less than 1% of the installed phones. So best case scenario would be Jelly Bean supports 7 (no indication that's true), which means 85% of Android devices would be covered if we set a Java 7 minimum. Next best would be KitKat (more likely but not according to the install instructions) which means 39%. As for Java 5, that was needed for pre-Gingerbread Android OS which accounts for 0.5% of the market. I guess with all of that it's clear that Java 5 is unnecessarily being maintained at this point. Both surveys of servers and Android show far less than 1% usage. It seems Java 6 penetration may be still be pretty substantial, even conservatively at on the order of 25% (if Java 7 and 8 adoption picked up dramatically in 6 months after the surveys as I imagine it did to some extent). So it seems the most reasonable conservative play would be to stick with Java 6, especially if we can confirm that between half to 85% of Android devices can't use Java 7 language features. A more aggressive play would be to set a requirement for Java 7. Setting the minimum at Java 8 at this time seems overly aggressive at this time though. https://plumbr.eu/blog/most-popular-java-environments-in-2014 http://pages.zeroturnaround.com/Java-Tools-Technologies.html http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html http://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-android-sdk-versions On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 11:20 PM, Silviu Burcea <silviuburcea...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think Rebel Labs or Plumbr have some metrics about JDK usage. > > On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 10:21 PM, Hank Grabowski <h...@applieddefense.com> > wrote: > > > Java 8 has only been out for less than a year. There is still a sizable > > percentage of groups that have not converted up to Java 8 for myriad > > reasons. While I was surprised that we are requiring backwards > > compatibility with the ten year old Java 5 I think jumping all the way to > > requiring Java 8 may be a bit too much of a stretch. I would vote for a > > minimum required version of Java 7 with the ability to run in Java 8. I > > wish I could find metrics to quantify the penetration of each of the > JDKs, > > but my gut says Java 7 would a reasonable cutoff. > > > > On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Gilles <gil...@harfang.homelinux.org> > > wrote: > > > > > Raising this issue once again. > > >>> Are we going to upgrade the requirement for the next major release? > > >>> > > >>> [ ] Java 5 > > >>> [ ] Java 6 > > >>> [ ] Java 7 > > >>> [ ] Java 8 > > >>> [ ] Java 9 > > >>> > > >> > > > Counts up to now: > > > > > > Java 7 -> 2 > > > Java 7 or 8 -> 2 > > > Java 8 -> 2 > > > > > > Any more opionions? > > > > > > Gilles > > > > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org > > > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > - OCPJP7 (90%) > - OCAJP7 (93%) > - Java and Big Data Enthusiast >
