21yo male student WLTM stunning converter tool, willing to exchange Java 1.5 source code for equivalent Java 1.4 code, to share an appreciation of the finer things in life with: stack-based VMs, strict typing, object orientation and garbage collection. GSoH a must.

(Yuletide wishes and fluttered eyelashes to whoever finds such a mythical tool first. Alternatively, a relatively large open source 1.4 project might have to do.)

Don't think there is such a thing. I reckon your best shot is to try compiling and running the thing in Jave 1.4 and to fix the bugs. There's not likely to be tons I wouldn't have thought, although it depends on how you've written it and how many 1.5 specific features you've used. Regarding garbage collection and whatnot, I don't think there's any difference, it's generally just if you've used any specific Java 1.5 features.

GUIs will look a bit different when running under the 1.4 JRE as it doesn't support as much graphical niceness in XP and such, but there's not much you can do about that.

I don't actually want to run it, oddly enough, which is why any reasonably large 1.4 codebase will do.

There's no use of the more advanced 1.5 language constructs, but manually removing all the use of Generics for collections and inserting all the necessary casts as well as re-writing all the for loops would be way too much work to bother with.

I wasn't sure there'd be such a thing either, but the chap supervising my dissertation seemed to think there would be.