a case for reconsidering JEP 398: Deprecate the Applet API for Removal

Alan Snyder javalists at cbfiddle.com
Sat Apr 17 19:44:52 UTC 2021


> On Apr 16, 2021, at 5:54 AM, <mark.yagnatinsky at barclays.com> <mark.yagnatinsky at barclays.com> wrote:
> 
>> And of course they can keep running JDK 17 after that for as long as it still runs on their hardware and OS
> 
> That's a good point.  For Windows user's that's likely pretty long.
> Even for Mac users it's likely until the next time Apple decides to do yet another CPU architecture change.
> 

I beg to differ. At some point, an application using the “old” library may need to switch to a newer JDK for unrelated reasons, at which point the “old” library would fail if Applet had been removed.

Although Applet may not be the most important compatibility issue, the proposed resolution (keep the class but rewrite the methods to throw an exception) seems harmless. Why not do that?

Perhaps we need a new deprecation category: "deprecated for defunctionalization” (in other words, it is not removed but stops working).

(Sorry about the odd terminology, but I was unable to think of a better term that could not be accused of being “politically incorrect”).

  Alan



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