Use Java 5 feature in Jdk1.4

I have been getting the itch for a long tome to use Java 5 features like generics, new concurrency (java.util.concurrent), autoboxing, "for each" loop and many more. But sadly I can not do it at work because ColdFusion has to be supported on all application servers. Since many of the application servers are still on J2EE 1.4 and not all of them are compatible with Java 5, we have to write JDK1.4 compliant code. Which means that all those wonderful features of Java5 can not be used for some more time to come. Or so I thought until yesterday when I read Brian Goetz's (of "Java concurrency in practice" fame) article which says that we can use some of the Java features in JDK1.4 also.
At first I was kind of puzzled as in how could that be possible? Did they had these features and they just did not mention about it in JDK1.4 or probably they just sneaked it in 1.4 in last moment but not talk about it because of some reasons.

It dawned to me when I went halfway through the article. It looks like most of these new syntaxes did not need any change in the bytecode instruction set which means that the compiler would generate the same bytecodes or instruction set for it as it would have for equivalent code without using these features. So it should be possible to use a class created by java5 compiler in 1.4. But don't we get UnsupportedClassVersionError when we try to do that?

Here is the catch. Due to some reasons they had to change the class version and that is why this UnsupportedClassVersionError. However these guys added a flag to java compiler (which ofcourse is undocumented) that can allow this. You need to invoke javac with "-source 1.5 -target jsr14" option and this will generate 1.4 compatible bytecodes for java5 syntax. This means I can happily write my code using generics, autoboxing, for..each loop, compile it with java5 compiler with this flag and be assured that this can run on 1.4 VM also.

That leaves one more set of features i.e; new concurreny, which I really really like in java5 and want to use. Thankfully some guys at Distibuted Computing Lab at Emory University have backported java5 concurrency (java.uti.concurrent) features that can be used in java 1.3+. I have infact used it and it is awesome !

So most of the juicy stuffs that were added in java5 can run on 1.4. Off to checking it out little more. :)