Java : Is there a tool to make code (in a 3rd party JAR) forward compatible (1.4 - 1.6)

Question

Hi

I have a 3rd party JAR file that is compiled using Java 1.4. Is there a tool that can make the jar file compatible with Java 1.6? (Something like 'retrotranslator' but what does the reverse of it).
I tried decompiling the class files and re compile them in 1.6 but it fails.

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Here is the issue:

My project uses 'rsadapter.jar' for was 5.1 and I had my project setup in Eclipse 2.0 + JDK 1.4 and it used to work fine. Now, I have migrated to Java 1.6 and Eclipse Ganymede (as per the requirements) and the same project (exactly same setup) started complaining about the missing class files in the 'rsadapter.jar'. I put the JAR in classpath explicitly too but it still could not load the classes. Then I changed the Java Compiler version to 1.4 and it started working.

Regards,
- Ashish

Answer 1

Classes compiled by JDK 1.4 should be usable in a Java 6 runtime as-is. If you have actually encountered a problem, please describe it.

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Update: I can only reproduce this with types in the "default" package (that is, not in a package). Are the classes you are trying to use in the default package? Also, this happens to me regardless of the JDK version used to compile.

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Update: Okay, after a little research, I realized that you can never reference a type in the unnamed package from a named package. Makes sense, but definitely not what you are running into.

I can compile code under JDK 1.4.2_19 and utilize it just fine in a Java 6 Eclipse project. I think that this problem is something specific to your environment. In this situation, I would backup Eclipse and recreate everything (JDK installation, workspace, projects) from scratch, to see if I could clear it up.

Answer 2

May be you have defined Eclipse to throw compiler errors on use of deprecated methods or classes?

Answer 3

I had another issue with some legacy code written in Java 1.4.x: the authors loved enumerations and loved to name the corresponding variables 'enum'. They even used it for package names. And this prevents from compiling the code under Java 1.5 (or higher) quite successfully.

Changing that automatically is quite an issue.