I have a library I develop (XMLC [1]) that depends on JDK1.3 and also depends 
on Xerces.  That said, part of the reason of depending on JDK1.3 is to stay in 
line with the Xerces dependency on JDK1.3.  The other reason is that JDK1.3 is 
free and clear of any built-in XML APIs, which allows me to include exactly 
the JAXP library of my choice (xml-apis.jar) without worry of compile-time 
binding to odd invalid APIs included in 1.4 (such as some stuff meant for the 
HTML2 API that got placed in the HTML1 API DOM package namespace).  But if 
Xerces decides to move to a later version of Java, then I will probably move 
XMLC right along with it.

That said, I would think that if Xerces were going to bother making a move at 
all it would move to JDK1.5 rather than bother with 1.4.  Xerces 2.10 is 
always there for 1.3 and 1.4 codebases, which should all be well into 
maintenance mode meaning few, if any, library changes.  Moving to 1.5 would 
allow Xerces to take advantage of all the new language constructs added in 
1.5, as well as APIs added in 1.5 (e.g., StringBuilder -vs- StringBuffer).

So, +1 for changing JDK dependency in general, but I would prefer a move 
straight to JDK1.5+ skipping JDK1.4 support.  This also seems to be what a lot 
of Apache commons libraries are doing, so it's certainly not unprecedented.

[1] http://forge.ow2.org/projects/xmlc/


Jake

On Thu, 8 Jul 2010 11:36:07 -0400
  Michael Glavassevich <mrglavas@ca.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> (including general@xml.apache.org on the cc list to hopefully reach a wider
> audience)
> 
> We're talking again on the Xerces j-dev mailing list about dropping support
> for JDK 1.3. The reason being that current builds of the XPath 2.0
> processor (Eclipse PsychoPath) used by the XML Schema 1.1 implementation
> require JDK 1.4. While we do have a one-off PsychoPath jar that was built
> with JDK 1.3 some time ago, in order to pick up recent bug fixes in this
> library we need to refresh it with the JDK 1.4 version. This would only
> impact the XML Schema 1.1 enabled release for now but at some point in the
> future when XML Schema 1.1 becomes stable (both spec and impl) this would
> get merged into the main line.
> 
> Given the age of JDK 1.3 and that it's generally out of service my
> intuition is that this upgrade would probably be okay but wanted to check
> with users on their needs. Is there anyone out there still using Xerces-J
> with JDK 1.3? If you are, how long into the future will you continue to do
> so, and would you be willing to migrate to JDK 1.4 (or higher) to be able
> to use XML Schema 1.1?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Michael Glavassevich
> XML Parser Development
> IBM Toronto Lab
> E-mail: mrglavas@ca.ibm.com
> E-mail: mrglavas@apache.org


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