NetworkTables needs to change.

[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by mathmogul

I'm not sure. WPILib uses Java 8 exclusively so that's all we've bothered to test. Peter could give a definitive answer.

I'll try to respond to some of the other messages in this thread later this evening, but first, a couple of quick notes.

I know of only one definite Java 8 dependency in the new NT, and I just committed it a couple days ago: I added more advanced notification features but I didn't want to break backwards compatibility with existing Java code, so I added a "default" implementation of the new interface function to ITableListener. Having a "default" like this is unfortunately a Java 8 feature, but this should be easy to work around for previous versions if you don't care about backwards compatibility. Is there real interest out there for older Java versions?

That being said, I've not actually tested it with older Java versions, so it's possible there's another dependency, but the new Java code is a thin wrapper around a JNI interface to the C++ library, so there's only 5 or 6 Java files (and only one real "implementation" class).

Java and C++ will both use the new C++ implementation, but it's still up in the air whether LabView will use the C++ library or continue using a LabView-native implementation (with the same protocol improvements).

Please note there are a few API changes in the library that required updates to wpilib code, which means it won't work "out of the box" with last year's wpilib (the C++ version I know has API breakage; I need to double-check, but the Java API should have minimal to no breakage).

It's worth noting the new C++ implementation is interoperable with old clients and servers, with the only downside being you won't have access to the new features from the older clients/servers (of course).