Query about jre version 1.4 or 1.7

Spark Spark Support
1

In the sparkplug kit instructions it says:

To setup a project to run Spark within your IDE, you will need to the following:

  • It is required that you use the 1.4 JRE to build Spark.

However I am sure I saw somewhere that using jre 1.7 was better for runtime. Does the 1.4 recomendation for build still apply?

Thanks

David

2

I’m not a developer, but Spark should be working with JRE 7. But i’m not sure about sparkplug. It hasn’t been updated for many years, so maybe it will not work with new JRE.

3

You seem to share my doubts. Maybe someone here know about sparkplug.

Incidentally does anyone know why sparkplug has not been updated?

david

4

That’s a long story. There is not much active development on Spark (sometimes more, sometimes none). Only a few volunteers usually do some stuff, so there is no time or interest in Sparkplug. If i could, i would remove most of the pages from this site leaving only forums, downloads page and a few docs This site is super old and much stuff here is outdated and misleading. Sparkplug is from 2006, 7 years old already…

5

You can and should use a jre 1.7. Most of the code base of Openfire / Spark was developed in the mid 2000. Nevertheless most of the stuff is production grade, e.g. the Spark Client Control plugin in Openfire.

The Spark Plug mechanism works in the latest trunk of Spark and we are using regulary. No need to be pesimistic about the dev community. This is an Apache licensed project, so we do not see all commercial activities via code contribution. But there are at least two active teams out there.

6

Hello David,

Try a build with jdk/jre 7 - it works great. j7 adds a lot of language improvements and actually fixes bugs in jre6 and lower. You should use it whenever possible.

I don’t have any experience working with sparkplug, but…

For building Spark, I can successfully build on a win7, winXP using Oracle j7 and Fedora (linux) box using OpenJDK 7 with no issues. For packaging, simply bundle your jre7 folder and rename to “jre”, then include it in your package build for something like Advanced Installer or similar.

I think if you see a requirement of j4 or something, you can more or less treat it as a “j4 minimum requirement”… Happy building!