Probably the wrong audience to ask, but are there any opinions as to whether I should update the spec for J2SE 5.0 or leave it in a J2SE 1.4 compatible state? There are several strong advantages to 5.0, including type-safe enumerations and generics. The only disadvantage is that the new 5.0 syntax is not backwards compatible, which would force all DRMAA implementations to move to J2SE 5.0. 5.0 is available on most platforms these days. MacOS X < 10.4 is one notable exception, though.

Most serious operating systems have support for J2SE 5. Anybody else can use the different backport libraries available for Java 5 features. I am only aware of the SGE DRMAA Java implementation - the Condor version will be started when the language binding is really stabilized ;-) Therefore there seems to be no big problem with existing stuff. From my understanding, this decision shouldn't have impact on the IDL spec (which is the more important aspect for me). It could happen that some of the design decisions, which originated from Java 1.4 language restrictions, can be revised now. Best regards, Peter.