Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I know most have likely already seen this article, but just in case, MigratingtoJava5 .

Its an interesting article for a few reasons. It shows the migration path which involved less obvious steps like "Introduce Java 1.5 tools to the development environment, but allow compilation only as Java 1.4" and " Deploy Java 1.5 in production, running as Java 1.4". These small steps are likely often overlooked but very good ideas (as opposed to the more standard get it to work on 1.5 and use it). Also it divulges a little of the walmart.com infrastructure and notes that Apache, Tomcat and Axis are major parts (in a "loosely coupled" cluster that serves over 100 million page views a day). And the article details some of the difficulties encountered.

Overall I have to give huge credit to walmart.com. They made the change because of real advantages, made it in a very calculated and smart manner and they are seeing benefits (and are ahead of the game, according to some Java 5 still isnt ready to be used ;)). I see the plan took a long time to implement but lets face it, some of us work on MUCH MUCH less complicated systems and are still using Java 1.2 or 1.3.