Support for Java 5 will be dropped for all upcoming Bio-Formats and OMERO releases; Java 6 or higher will be required. This will include the stable 4.4.9 release and the 5.0.0-Beta2 release. Support for Matlab releases 2007a and earlier, which use Java 5, will also be dropped; version 2007b or higher will be required.
Note that Java 5 has had no public updates since April 2008, and was end of life in October 2009¹. In particular, please be aware that it no longer has security updates. Users of systems such as RHEL5/CentOS5 which default to using Java 5 can download Java 7 packages from Oracle². Users of older versions of ImageJ can download an updated ImageJ which provides Java 6³.
We would be interested in hearing feedback if you are in a situation where it is not possible to upgrade to a more recent version of Java, and this change will cause problems. In particular, it would be useful to have the details of the system you are using.
1. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html
2. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
3. http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/download.html
Regards,
Roger Leigh
