I'm a Java archeologist

June 21, 2004

For my current mission, I've to port a web application developped for Tomcat 3.2 to Tomcat 4.x. Not a big deal, I thought...

Unfortunately, there is a minor change between Tomcat 3.2 and 4.x which made my working life a hell today: by default, Tomcat 3.2 imports java.util.Vector in the JSP page while Tomcat 4.x doesn't.

Since almost all the JSP pages of the application use Vector to iterate the data, I've to check every JSP page and explicitely add the import statement to make it work on Tomcat 4.x

I've got the weird feeling of being a Java archeologist: Java is not that old but it's still quite amazing to see the differences between the code written in early Java (and JSP 1.0 for the circumstances) and current Java state of the art.
I wondered how it'll feel when Java 1.5 (generics, metadata, concurrency) is be used everyday?