docx4j - require Java 8 or later?

[jason]

This post is to solicit feedback as to whether the next major release of docx4j (and Docx4j Enterprise) should require Java 8 or later?

docx4j 6 (and forthcoming 6.1) and its dependencies require Java 6 or later.

But recent versions of some of these deps require more recent versions of Java, so to keep the deps current (not to mention new programming features and security considerations), docx4j must move along as well.

I'm proposing that we release a docx4j 8 which requires Java 8 or later. (That is, we skip Java 7 entirely). If this is the way forward, our first Java 8 release will be in 1 month or so.

https://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-s ... -cost.html is interesting: Oracle will stop provided free updates for Java 8 for commercial use in Jan 2019, but OpenJDK updates will be available to June 2023. Maybe after docx4j 8 we have docx4j 11?!

Other considerations:

- Android: API level 24 supports many Java 8 features: https://developer.android.com/studio/wr ... a8-support some experimentation will be required to make sure we fit within a suitable subset. Whether we target level 24 or something later is to be determined.

- docx4j.NET: there is IKVM support for Java 8, so we ought to be able to continue to produce an IKVM'd .NET dll for docx4j 8. After Java 8 is a problem, since IKVM development has ceased: http://weblog.ikvm.net/

Thoughts/comments?