Tiger Snapshots: bringing early feedback into the release cycle...

Mark Reinhold just announced that J2SE 1.5.0 snapshots are now available. These are slightly tested builds that contain the latest fixes and changes to the latest release of J2SE, Tiger.

The intention of the snapshots are to get early feedback into the final stages of releasing Tiger. This approach has proven very successful in many communities - it is particularly common in the open source community - and I am particularly happy that Sun is embracing it in a number of product families. From my engineering perspective, it is nice to see this tendency: it can only lead to improved quality in the products.

Here are some other "early access" releases from Sun that I am aware of:

• Tiger snapshots
• Solaris express
• NetBeans Development Downloads
• Weekly builds for JAX-RCP and JAXB.

I'm surely missing many others, but this is certainly a good trend.