eXist 2.2RC2 and oXygen 12.0

[mountainbiker]

Whilst we have a maintenance license to cover us up through the current version of oXygen, our company is extremely delinquent in upgrading our baseline software. Therefore, we are currently running oXygen 12.0.

We recently upgrade our development eXist server from eXist 2.1 to 2.2RC2. In oXygen, we add a data source for eXist 2.2RC2 and pointed it towards the 2.2RC2's exist.jar, ws-commons-util-1.0.2.jar, xmldb.jar, xmlrpc-client-3.1.3.jar, and xmlrpc-common-3.1.3.jar.

When we try to view the structure of this new db in the Data Source Explorer -- we get the following error "Could not instantiate: ro.sync.db.nxd.exist.ExistSession due to: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/exist/xquery/XPathException: Unsupported magor.minor version 51.0".

Do you have any guidance on how to proceed?

[adrian]

Hello,

Please note that Oxygen v12.0 does not officially support eXist 2.x (not even 2.0). So, you may encounter some unexpected problems when using it in this configuration.

The UnsupportedClassVersionError you are seeing happens because eXist is compiled for Java 7 and Oxygen 12 is bundled with Java 6, which cannot run Java 7 compiled classes (unless backwards compatibility is explicitly mentioned). For Windows and Linux you will have to replace the Java 6 runtime that comes bundled with Oxygen ('Oxygen/jre' folder) with a Java 7 runtime.

On what platform are you running Oxygen (Windows, Linux, Mac)?

Regards,
Adrian

[mountainbiker]

We are using oXygen on Windows 7 (talking to our eXist on Linux)

(Maybe we can use this to prompt the software group to get us upgraded.)

We were are able to function with our eXist 2.1 servers.

As a side note, we also noticed our oXygen 12.0 doesn't have the latest Saxon to support XQuery 3.0

[adrian]

Hi,

Support for XQuery 3.0 transformations (Saxon-EE) has been introduced starting with v14.0, so an upgrade would be advisable.


To attempt to make eXist 2.2 work with v12.0 (though I cannot provide any guarantees due to the lack of official support), you should download a Java SE 7 runtime (get the .tar.gz variant) for your specific platform and architecture (32/64 bit, the same architecture as the Oxygen installation kit):
Java SE Runtime Environment 7 Downloads
Quit Oxygen, navigate to its installation folder and rename the 'jre' folder (e.g. 'jre.old'). Extract the downloaded Java SE 7 runtime (tar.gz), rename its folder to 'jre' and move it to the Oxygen installation folder. Check if the JRE paths are correct: Oxygen/jre/bin (where the 'java' executable is located).
Start Oxygen and check the Java version in: Help > About, System properties, java.version. If it's Java 7 it should be able to load the eXist 2.2 classes.

Regards,
Adrian

[mountainbiker]

@adrian

Thank you so much for the workaround. Our silly company has this area locked down from the developers. We'll have to concentrate on getting the enterprise team to upgrade our baseline to oXygen 16 (or at least the JRE).

As eXist 2.1 was working with the oXygen 12's java 1.6.0_18, I attempted to connect with these older eXist 2.1 JARs and had success. I know this could be risky, but the 2.2RC2 version is for development/testing so the risk won't be an issue.

Thanks again for the assistance. We'll see you and your team in Praha soon