There is a proposal for JMeter to require at least Java 1.4.
This has now been agreed; JMeter now requires at least Java 1.4
This gives the opportunity to make some changes and improvements.
JDBC Pooling
might be worth replacing all the Excalibur stuff with standard Java pooling.
or perhaps Commons DBCP
Regular Expressions
ORO works well - is there any point moving to java regular expressions?
Java REs allow look-behind matching; however there are some concerns about the way it treats line-endings. It appears that the line-endings can vary between Host OSes; this is not really suitable for JMeter.
Miscellaneous features
Remove work-rounds for the following:
Boolean.toString (now done)
Boolean.valueOf(boolean) (now done)
String.replaceAll, String.split, String.replace mostly done
URLDecoder / URLEncoder (now done)
Allow the use of the following:
Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory(); (Memory Benchmark class) (now done)
Additional Exceptions
HTTPSampler and TCPClient could make use of more that just IOException
Chained Exceptions
could remove/simplify JMeter and HTMLParse error/exception classes
use getCause() to improve logging information
Probably not worth using
LINE_END instead of EAST etc. This only makes sense if JMeter is updated to support BIDI.