Back in May of this year Todd Huss made the argument that it was too soon for his company to move to Java 5. His argument seems to center around the fact that being an early adopter is risky and the safest course of action may be to wait until there is no choice but to upgrade.

In summary, I think the right time to move is after the early adopters have gone through most of the pain and moving to J2SE 5 starts to become mainstream.

That was six months ago, and that same sentiment still seems to be fairly common. Just last month Daniel Steinberg posted some of the same hesitations about upgrading. Is upgrading to Java 5 really that risky?

Sun doesn’t think so, the automatic update feature of the JRE is updating end users to Java 5. Users who go to java.com to download a JRE get version 5. Sun has also created a site to encourage developers to adopt Tiger and has published an article detailing reasons to migrate. Recently, Wal-Mart successfully migrated their servers to Java 5.

I don’t think the real problem here is technical, but rather social. Java 5 has proven to be fast and stable and has a number of big benefits for developers. Now is the time for the community to shed it’s collective fear of upgrading and get behind Java 5 in a big way.

Something else to consider is that Sun is attempting to reduce the amount of time that passes between major versions of Java. Java 6, a.k.a Mustang, will be ready sometime next year. Holding off on moving to Java 5 now may make the transition to Java 6 more difficult when it is available. If upgrading one version is painful, just think how bad moving up two versions will be.

Tags: java, java5, myths, upgrading