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

Question

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 wha

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.