Hello JGO

I'm building an educational program in Java with secondary school students in focus. To be more precise, a program that explains math to em. When i started to work on this program Java 1.7 had just been released but no eclipse support for it and I don't like to work in netBeans. But now with the eclipse support I want to make use of java 1.7 stuff like switch statements for strings and the try with resource thingie, my problem is: Will a java 7 written program be of any use for students? Java 6 is installed on pretty much all computers i have seen so far. But i don't know how well java 1.7 has been welcomed by users, do you guys have any experience in this field? Do people use java 7 yet? if not, when will they start using it or will they skip it to go to java 8 that i have read somewhere will be released 2012?

//Kurten

I see, thanks for the reply Do you have any idea if java 7 will be widely distributed in a couple of months or will it be a very slow process?

For schools, it will probably be at least another year, as lots of institutions upgrade their software during the summer holidays.

If you do chose to target 6, then I'd recommend developing on 6 too, instead of 7. Although you can set Java 7 to target Java 6, there is nothing to stop you accidentally using any new classes or methods which are exclusive to 7.

np. I used to work part time for the Greenfoot team, which is also a Java application aimed at schools. Java 6 was released 5 years ago, yet they only officially switched from Java 5 to 6 earlier this year. Even then they still compile Greenfoot to target Java 5, as they still have users on that.

I recommend you stick with Java 6. Unless you really, really, want the new features provided by the Java 7 library, Java 6 is the better choice. Especially for schools, which always have a hard time upgrading their computers and software.