[Alupis]

If you really, really must have the latest and greatest of some package, you can always use the IUS Community's RPM repos for RHEL/CentOS (it's run my Rackspace for their servers).[1]

But, we're talking about enterprise here, no young hip startups. Enterprise wants stability over everything else, young hip startups want the new shiny.

There are huge amount of Java 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 applications still running in Enterprise all around the world with zero issues. Most of the time it doesn't make financial sense to re-build or spend time debugging an upgrade just to have the latest runtime.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

[1] https://iuscommunity.org/pages/About.html

[merb]

I understand to run Java 1.5, or better Java 1.6 but not 1.3 and 1.4 that's aweful. But I know that's a fact since I've used Apache Fop and they try to have a compatibility up to Java 1.3. For me I've writing all my software with the latest Java, but I don't care which os (even RHEL 5/6 would work, if they could get java 8 to run) Supporting everything down needs have so many more Lines of Code and is rareley harder to maintain / code. Especially Option Types and Java 9 + Java 10 brings your Java Code to a further level, I also don't get it why somebody would code a new project via J2EE if there are so many great servers like wildfly and netty.

[Alupis]

Well, a Java 1.3 application isn't going to be a new application - usually a legacy application which has a lot of custom libraries built specifically for that version of Java, and would require significant effort to bring the codebase up to date in terms of running on a modern platform. At my company, one of our most used internal applications runs on 1.3 - it's an application which allows user-made plugins, however we don't have the source for the main application, which means we're stuck maintaining a 1.3 system.

As an aside, J2EE is quite good and very prevalent in enterprise, JBoss, GlassFish, Tomcat, etc...