Java 7

[Jaedayr]

I know that at one point it was recommended to stay at Java 6 and not upgrade to 7 because of things that were affected in the software. Is that still true, or is it safe to upgrade? Sorry if I missed the green light, but I keep turning down the upgrade every day when my system prompts me for it until I know it is OK.

[Chris H.]

A number of people updated to java 7 and reported bugs/crashes. Hellfish was able to institute a fix and we hope that the one issue was addressed.

I am not sure if all of the java 7 issues are now fixed as someone has reported that forge does not work with java 7.

If someone with tech ability wanted to update and then let the rest of us know how his tests came out that would be great.

[PowerClaws]

A number of people updated to java 7 and reported bugs/crashes. Hellfish was able to institute a fix and we hope that the one issue was addressed.

I am not sure if all of the java 7 issues are now fixed as someone has reported that forge does not work with java 7.

If someone with tech ability wanted to update and then let the rest of us know how his tests came out that would be great.

Im not a tech person, but im running Java 7 (update 7, if it helps) and havent had any problems

[Agetian]

I'd like to revive this topic in the context of recent discussions related to Java 7 in the main, non-developer part of our forums. Personally I can say that I have tried to run Forge under Java 7 Update 9 for a quite extended period of time lately, and I haven't experienced any unusual behavior or crashes related to that fact (I recall that about a year ago I had to downgrade to Java 6 because the game crashed every now and then under Java 7 for seemingly no apparent reason, but a couple months ago or so I have once again upgraded to Java 7 and decided to give it another go, not knowing exactly whether the issue was corrected or not, and did not have any issues with the game yet since then).

Has anyone else tried running Forge under Java 7 recently and, if yes, can you please report on your experience? The only post I've found relevant to this discussion (from the recent days) is the one by PowerClaws above, which also states that no crashes were experienced with Java 7, but that's about it, everything else (including the latest beta threads) still references Java 6 and recommends not to upgrade to Java 7 yet, but as far as I understand, that's more of a safety precaution because not much data is potentially available about whether the problem is really fixed or not. That being said, do we have a complete understanding of what exactly was incompatible with Java 7 that caused crashes in the past? If so, is there any definite conclusion that can be made about whether the issue we were experiencing is supposed to be fixed or not? If not, is there at least a test case that can be used to reproduce the previous crashes under Java 7 to check whether the problem still exists or not?

- Agetian

[Hellfish]

The fix by me that Chris mentions is here:
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=7268&p=90803#p90803

Basically, Swing threw a hissy fit, no fault of ours.
Weren't the string concatenation -> StringBuilder conversions from a long time ago related to Java compatibility too?

[Agetian]

Thank you for the info, Hellfish!
Any further feedback, if any, is welcome!

- Agetian

[Chris H.]

The fix by me that Chris mentions is here:
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=7268&p=90803#p90803

Basically, Swing threw a hissy fit, no fault of ours.

 
Thank you for figuring this out and for fixing it. It appears that we may now be Java 7 compatible.

Weren't the string concatenation -> StringBuilder conversions from a long time ago related to Java compatibility too?

 
In the early days following the first SVN implementation it was pointed out to our group that we should not use string concatenation and we should use StringBuilder instead. StringBuilder is supposed to be somewhat faster. I do not remember any Java compatibility though.

I may get back to the string concatenation -> StringBuilder conversions at some point.

[Chris H.]

I'd like to revive this topic in the context of recent discussions related to Java 7 in the main, non-developer part of our forums. Personally I can say that I have tried to run Forge under Java 7 Update 9 for a quite extended period of time lately, and I haven't experienced any unusual behavior or crashes related to that fact (I recall that about a year ago I had to downgrade to Java 6 because the game crashed every now and then under Java 7 for seemingly no apparent reason, but a couple months ago or so I have once again upgraded to Java 7 and decided to give it another go, not knowing exactly whether the issue was corrected or not, and did not have any issues with the game yet since then).

Has anyone else tried running Forge under Java 7 recently and, if yes, can you please report on your experience? The only post I've found relevant to this discussion (from the recent days) is the one by PowerClaws above, which also states that no crashes were experienced with Java 7, but that's about it, everything else (including the latest beta threads) still references Java 6 and recommends not to upgrade to Java 7 yet, but as far as I understand, that's more of a safety precaution because not much data is potentially available about whether the problem is really fixed or not. That being said, do we have a complete understanding of what exactly was incompatible with Java 7 that caused crashes in the past? If so, is there any definite conclusion that can be made about whether the issue we were experiencing is supposed to be fixed or not? If not, is there at least a test case that can be used to reproduce the previous crashes under Java 7 to check whether the problem still exists or not?

 
I suspect that we may be Java 7 compatible at this time. I think that we should try to shoot for Java 6 for the time being as people are likely to be playing on machines that are stuck at Java 6 for the moment.

In the past we had a similar situation with Java 5 vs Java 6. Some users could not update the computer that they were using to Java 6. Someone would add code to the SVN that required Java 6 and the Java 5 people would be unhappy.

At some point we have to move into the future.

[Agetian]

Yes, I completely agree that the Forge code base should stay at JRE 6 level for the time being, it's good to keep support for the people who are at the Java 6 level at the moment, but perhaps we shouldn't restrict the people who can and are willing to upgrade to JRE 7 from doing so anymore, because there's no current evidence of the problem still persisting. At least some broader testing (public testing, in other words) has to happen at some point, or we won't know for sure if everything's OK or not (as for my personal experience, like I said, I can't find any evidence of the problem still happening with the current version of Forge).