This morning Sun officially released Java 6 for download after over two years of development. The Java 6 development cycle has been the most open of any Java release with weekly builds available to the public and extensive collaboration between Sun and over 330 external developers. Sun has worked with over 160 companies to ensure backwards compatibility, stability and optimum performance of applications running on the JVM.
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2006-07-12
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2006-05-12
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2005-11-15
From my first tests of the full version (I tried out the beta but decided not to base any conclusions on it, though they were good), it has sped up my Java applications such as PCGen, JAlbum and Azureus by a considerable margin. PCGen in particular feels easily twice as fast.
When I shuffle off home again, I'm going to try out the world's biggest, nastiest, most brutal Java application (in my experience, anyway) called Dunjinni which catalogs and loads a good amount of over 3,000 images before popping up, and bogs my AMD-64 machine to the max until it's good and ready to give me an interface. Bad programming meets Java latency... I'm hoping this app will really show the mettle of Java's new standard performance or break miserably and show me that Dunjinni and I are going to part ways for good. Usually it takes as long as 5 minutes to give me a user interface, if you can imagine.
Kudos to Sun for improving their language flagship and I look forward to the GPL version being tightly integrated into my operatings systems in the future.
Edited 2006-12-11 20:34
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2005-09-20
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2005-10-09
Hopefully we'll start to see more cross-platform applications as Java catches on. The client-side "slowness" has been a problem for a lot of people (I've never heard so many complaints) but Java 6 address a lot of this. With the license change coming down the road, it's not unlikely that we'll start seeing applications pop up on unix/linux/windows/osx all at the same time. Can't wait! 
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2006-12-11
According to:
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/install/system-configurations...
There still is no 64-bit firefox plugin on any platform. There is support for 64-bit IE.
Member since:2005-11-15
There still is no 64-bit firefox plugin on any platform. There is support for 64-bit IE.
That's why the GPL release of Java is a long-awaited thing. I suspect you will see more direct Java hooks in Firefox and other worthwhile browsers as a result, and no doubt there will be a release of a 64 bit plugin directly compiled on your operating system of choice if you are using *nix or Macintosh.
In a few months, complaints like yours will likely be no more.
Member since:2006-07-12
I hope you're right. It's a shame, though, that it will be left to the community to do this.
You'd think that at this moment more than ever that Sun would support the 64-bit version of a browser from the very community it's just opened its source code to!
Edited 2006-12-11 21:16
Member since:2005-08-22
That's why the GPL release of Java is a long-awaited thing. I suspect you will see more direct Java hooks in Firefox and other worthwhile browsers as a result, and no doubt there will be a release of a 64 bit plugin directly compiled on your operating system of choice if you are using *nix or Macintosh.
Of course, the tradeoff to this is there will be 3 different open source plugins, each of which has a different set of bugs/limitations.
Member since:2005-10-13
I'd take 3 different plugins each with limitations over 0 different plugins that don't exist any day...
I'm not so sure I agree, though. It should be simple enough to do a straight 64-bit port of the official Sun plugin, and everyone would know that any others that are created might not be as well supported.
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...why I have the feel that if Sun hadn't released Java as GPL I'd be thinking "Oh no, another version of that bloated crap" but now I think "Wow, a even faster version of java, I need to buy that java book"?
Jokes aside, the BIGGEST improvement in this release is the GPLization. Thanks sun
Edited 2006-12-11 21:00
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For starters, I can expect perfect and simple integration into my Linux distribution of choice. The rest is simply opinion based on experience. Take Netscape or Blender for example, both have gotten a lot more attractive after they became free software.
I noticed that I tend to judge software as much by its potential as on its current state, so a project becoming GPL makes a lot of difference in my perception of it. Suddenly all its strengths look more convincing and all its weaknesses don't look so bad after all. ;-)
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Of course it does, and very rightly so. Not so much with science (and yet...), but with technology, we should never let it be otherwise.
And in this case, ideology will bring tangible technical advantages for Java:
The legal possibility to distribute it freely will allow widespread deployment. A pervasive Java will make it practical to deliver programs of any size and complexity written in this language, which is now appropriate only for the largest apps and enterprise deployments.
The legal possibility to intervene in the development of Java will ease the efforts of groups other than Sun to add or model features in Java that they need to their ends. You'll see it getting very well integrated in Gnome and KDE, as well as in who knows how many apps.
The legal possibility to analize the code unbound will allow many bugs to be squashed and many optimizations to be ironed in. You'll se Java become better faster, as happens with Gnome, KDE and the Linux kernel.
And so on. So yes, even if Java 7 was just a slightly cut-down, GPL version of Java 6 it would be a vast ideological and technical advancement. And sure it will be much more than that.
Member since:2006-01-12
...why I have the feel that if Sun hadn't released Java as GPL I'd be thinking "Oh no, another version of that bloated crap" but now I think "Wow, a even faster version of java, I need to buy that java book"?
I agree that Java is slow and bloated is more of an image problem than a real problem with regard to the current Java platform.
However, it is important to note that the Hotspot Client VM received some important makeovers in Java 6. (See this: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/opinali/archive/2005/11/mustangs_hotsp...) Seeing how this is the VM encountered by most users, I guess the faster designation does have some grain of truth in it.
I really hope Sun would implement JIT caching in Java 7. It would enable the client VM to make use of some the more aggressive optimization techniques server VM users have been enjoying for years without sacrificing startup performance.
Edited 2006-12-12 07:00
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2005-11-10
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Java 6 proper isn't under the GPL. Java wasn't GPL'd until a month or so before the release, so the first *official* stable release of GPL Java will be Java 7.
If you want to start hacking today, you can go here and download the source to the JVM, JIT and source compiler: https://openjdk.dev.java.net/
The class libraries are currently undergoing GPLification and should be available the first quarter of 2007.
Edited 2006-12-11 21:36
Member since:
2005-07-21
This seems to be a really great release! Thanks to Sun and all volunteer for all the effort!
The webservice improvements and also the new functionality on the desktop looks good. Can't await the moment the whole class library is gpl and java is distributed by all the linux distributions per default.
Greetings
Mike
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2006-01-03
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This is excellent news!
I'm primarily a .NET developer, but as a right-tool right-job kind of guy I really appreciate that Sun is plunging forward and improving Java as much as they can. That really shows to me that Sun has been re-energized recently, and the Swing improvements scream that they're ready to make another grab for the desktop again.
Who knows, in the future I might have to bust out Eclipse and start coding in Java again!
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2006-11-22
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i understand where your coming from,
i find vb quite a and c# , easy but cumbersome and over controlling
i find java,despite some hem less than informed criticisms of it, to be quite good,
i do however beleive, say for example, instead of developing a linux app on mono, why not use java
if we have learned anything from linux, it is that when a corporation and volunteers can work together their product will rock the world. eg linux kernel
java will be in a similar position, SUN will provide a spark, and the foss community will add fuel to the fire
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2005-11-09
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Likely it will die (any positive improvements might be merged into Sun's GPL'd java). Either that or a few stubborn rage-against-the-machine-listening devs will keep hacking away at it. Doubtful, though. Of course, this is pure conjecture, nobody knows until the GPL-ization occurs of the class libs.
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2006-01-10
Looks like text antialising is enabled by default on Linux (not sure if this was always the case on some distros). It's a step in the right direction for making Swing look more modern. Throw on a good theme and before you know it the app looks and handles as well (or better) than a native QT / GTK app.
Browser: Links (2.1pre23; Linux 2.6.18 i686; 80x25)
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2006-02-15
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Still cracks me up that Sun dropped the "1." from their version numbering scheme.
They did the same thing with Solaris. Solaris 10 is really Solaris 2.10. Which in turn is SunOS 5.10.
At some point Emacs dropped the leading 1 in their version numbers. When they did it though, they did it pretty much completely. I don't know if the leading 1 is visible anywhere in the code, but it isn't in the UI.
Member since:
2005-07-06
For about seven years it have been impossible to use all keys on European keyboards with java. What keys that fails varies from country to country. On my Swedish keyboard it have been the tilde character that could not be typed.
There have been some exeptions, JDK1.5beta2 worked, and so did pre release builds of JDK1.6.
This time though, I'm not sure I can blame Sun, as the new Java seam to work on Fedora Core 4, but not on FC6.
At first I guessed it is a problem with the X server (xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.1.1-47.2.fc6), but it turned out that tilde worked just fine if I opened an ssh session to my FC4 box and displayed it on my FC6 Xorg server. Anybody that have any ideas?
Still, it is almost like there was a conspiracy against java on the Linux desktop. This is really a pity as the new java 6 seam to be really snappy, and comes with many desktop related features that would have been really nice for people that wanted to create cross platform desktop applicatin.
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2006-11-15
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2006-05-18
Unfortunately, this release does not include the fix for the huge Swing bug when running under compiz/beryl/glx. Here's a link to the Sun bug id:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6429775
If this is important to you, sign up and place a vote for this bug.
Member since:
2005-11-12
I downloaded it last night and used it with Limewire. The UI appeared to render faster. I keep waiting for Java to come bundled with an API to call GTK widgets. I know there are third party options for this but I am surprised the UI is still stuck in the pre-Linux Desktop era with Swing components. Java is definitely fast enough to be used for Desktop applications but one unappealing factor is large applications take a long time to load at startup since they are busy creating oodles of objects.
Member since:2005-07-08
Doesn't 6 now use GTK to render the buttons etc? Look here: http://ensode.net/java_swing_mustang_screenshots_gtk.html
You can even compare it to java 5. Clearly it looks much, much better. Perhaps Limewire doesn't take advantage of these integrations??
Member since:2005-11-12
Okay, I wrote a quick little Swing application with a button and a combobox. I compiled it and ran it on Java 6 and looked just like a real GTK app. Wow, it really works. I am impressed. I can see why people are excited about Java 6. Sun did a good job on this release.