[logback-dev] Investigation on the diffusion of innovation along with java releases

[Fernando Petrulio]

Dear Developers,

we are members of the ZEST research group (Zurich Empirical Software 
Engineering Team) based at the University of Zurich and the Delft 
University of Technology. We are conducting an investigation on the 
diffusion of innovations and we focus on the adoption of new language 
features. Our research is focused on how API producers adapt their 
interfaces to introduce support for Java 8’s lambdas. During the course 
of our investigation, we manually inspected logback-classic and 
logback-core’s source code and documentation to understand whether 
Java’s lambdas have widespread adoption. We would like to have your 
feedback on our findings.

Our study focuses primarily on Functional Interfaces and Lambda 
Expressions as these new features were introduced by the Java language 
and adopted the Java JDK API, as they reduce implementation complexity, 
improve readability, offer performance benefits and improve security 
contextualization.

Our analysis showed that LogBack 1.3 did not introduce compatibility 
with Java 8+ features, including Functional Interfaces and Lambda 
Expression. We would like to better understand as to why the API does 
not support newer Java language versions and their features.

Our investigation showed us that in most cases API producers do not 
migrate their APIs to newer Java Releases. Despite this, the API remains 
to be widely used by consumers on GitHub. Can you provide us with more 
information on this phenomenon?
Did you and your team ever discuss the migration to new Java releases? 
If so, what did this discussion entail?
What is the reason behind not migrating to a newer Java version?
Did the introduction of new language features such as lambda expressions 
influence your decision in any way?
Does your API plan on introducing support for lambda expressions in the 
future?

We thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. If you would 
like to be posted about the results of this study, please let us know!

Kind Regards,
Fernando Petrulio.

-- 
Fernando Petrulio
Ph.D. Student - University of Zurich UZH
Department of Informatics
fpetrulio at ifi.uzh.ch