How to use Java 5 on the cRIO

[Timeroot]

Hi!
I know that this is pretty outdated now because ... next year everyone will be on the RoboRIO.
But I'm sure there are some of you still playing with cRIOs and practicing and stuff! My team is just transitioning and going to use Java next year for the first time (well, my team is, I just graduated), and so I was teaching them on our cRIO and I was getting very frustrated that it only supports Java 2. Well, technically, source level 1.3, but it compiles down to 1.2. So I fixed it, and everyone can have boxing and unboxing and generics and stuff!

There are only three files to change.

1) Navigate to your sunspotfrcsdk directory. This is usually in your user directory, e.g. C:\Users\Jimbob\sunspotfrcsdk. Look in the "ant" folder, and open up "compile.xml" in a text editor. Look for where it says

target="1.2"
source="1.3"

and replace it with

target="1.5"
source="1.5"

2) In the same ant folder, open up preverify.xml. Look for where it says

</exec>
</else>

and then insert in the middle,

</exec>

<exec executable="powershell.exe" dir="@{preverify.dir}">
						<arg value="Get-ChildItem . -Filter *.class -Recurse | Foreach-Object {$bytes  = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes($_.FullName);$offset = 7;$bytes[$offset]   = 46;[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes($_.FullName, $bytes); }" />
					</exec>

</else>

3) Start using a modern version of preverify. You can get this from Oracle Java ME SDK 3.*, but since most people won't want to install that, I've also put the executable up on dropbox at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/.../preverify.exe that you can download (32-bit, so it will work for everyone). Put in sunspotfrcsdk/bin, overwriting the existing preverify.exe. If you want to be able to revert, just rename the old one as preverify_old.exe.

And this should do it! The bytecode is pretty much compatible through almost all major versions of Java, excepting where you get to 1.6's stack map tables or 1.7's invokedynamic opcode. The major version in the compiled class files is set as 49 which the romizer compiler rejects, but the powershell script just overwrites that byte and it all works as far as I can tell.

You might still have some issues with NetBeans highlighting your code and saying that it's set to source version 1.3; I can't find where this is set, yet, in order to get it to cooperate. If anyone else can figure it out, let me know! Now everyone can start using ArrayList<T> again.