Easy way to backport Java 6 code to Java 5?

Question

We've been developing a windows based application using Java for a while now, but NOW we want to make a mac port and have to reverse of code from Java 6 and Java 5. Is there any easy way to do this rather than re-coding Java 6 specific code? We'd like to keep our code up to date.

Answer 1

There are a couple of libraries out there which can help you. Unfortunately I haven't tried them myself, because I've never run into such a situation.

• Retroweaver
• Retrotransaltor
• backport-jsr166

Answer 2

See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_backporting_tools

I tried retrotranslator from 1.6 to 1.4.2 and it works pretty well!