Comment Sometimes stay off the cutting edge (Score 2, Informative) 241
Sometimes the answer is not to target the newest implementation but the one that is used on all platforms in use. For Java this means sometimes going back to the 1.0 API! You lose a lot
of cool functions but it is the only way. Then just make sure it works best on the newest platforms or browsers depending if the program runs on an OS or a web browser. This isn't always an easy thing to find out. We made a web application using Java 1.1 and it turns out that Netscape on the Mac supported it without any of the changes from 1.0 to 1.1 so it didn't work there. But recently I've heard that Netscape may finally be supporting 1.1 for real on the mac and 1.3 with OS X. Cool!!! If only we wrote the program in Java 1.0 there would be no problems (except that it would probably be really clunky).
of cool functions but it is the only way. Then just make sure it works best on the newest platforms or browsers depending if the program runs on an OS or a web browser. This isn't always an easy thing to find out. We made a web application using Java 1.1 and it turns out that Netscape on the Mac supported it without any of the changes from 1.0 to 1.1 so it didn't work there. But recently I've heard that Netscape may finally be supporting 1.1 for real on the mac and 1.3 with OS X. Cool!!! If only we wrote the program in Java 1.0 there would be no problems (except that it would probably be really clunky).
