After the recent release of the public review of JSR-283, discussions have mainly been focused on the demise of XPath support and the installment of a new query language model. One thing that shocked me, when I browsed through the API, was the complete lack of any Java 5 language constructs, like generics or enumerations.
Or take a look at a the parent POM of a project like Mule ESB: the target JVM is 1.4.
Hence "enterprise" Java is still a 1.4 world. Even if it is possible to run 1.4-compiled applications on recent JVMs, mainly to reap their performance benefits or management features, the Java community is dragged behind by this state of affair.
And this means, we have to carry on with pre-1.5 compatibility features, like erasure, until the corporate world leaves the 1.4 platform for something less retarded. The good thing is that this will inevitably happen.
