Java 1.8 as minimum required version ?

[agavrilov76]

Hi,

I have noticed that a minimal supported Java version is 1.6 which is quite old. Any plans to switch to 1.8?

One of the issues with 1.6 is that it doesn't have a decent Base64 support, so the pushgateway module has to use the javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary method from JAXB that is not longer present in the modern Java runtimes (since 10 I think). So the Maven library javax.xml.bind:jaxb-api containing javax.xml.bind comes as a transitive Maven dependency for pushgateway. Now the javax.xml.bind has recently been made deprecated in a favour of jakarta.xml.bind. Which leads to the situation of having two JAXB implementations being present in the application classpath.

Replacing javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary with java.util.Base64 in Java 8 would solve this issue :).

Thanks!

As a workaround for my project I'm going to simply exclude javax.xml.bind:jaxb-api in the pom.xml which should not cause troubles as long as the job name doesn't have / character and the basic auth is not used 😬

[fstab]

There are still some people stuck with legacy Java 6 applications that they need to maintain. The current status is that Java 6 is supported until December 2023, sponsored by Zulu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history). Zulu sponsors this for a reason, there is still demand.

That being said, we should fix the javax.xml.bind issue so that you can use pushgateway with the latest Java version without workarounds. Base64 encoding is about 20 lines of code (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Algorithm_Implementation/Miscellaneous/Base64), so if this is causing issues, we might consider to copy a Base64 implementation into our code base and get rid of the dependency.

[dhoard]

An embedded Base64 encoder would be great to get rid of the java.xml.bind dependency.

The algorithm in WikiBooks ((https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Algorithm_Implementation/Miscellaneous/Base64) is grossly inefficient so I'll look for a license compatible Base64 implementation.

[dhoard]

PR #698 to remove java.xml.bind dependency and use a public domain Base64 implementation.

@fstab please review

[dhoard]

@agavrilov76 code has been merged that should resolve the issue. Please test/review.

[agavrilov76]

@dhoard looks good! thanks.

[dhoard]

@dhoard looks good! thanks.

Thanks for the update. Please close the issue.