Editor's Daily Blog

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Java SE 6 goes final

Two years ago, Java SE 6 was in about the same stage that Java SE 7 is today: it existed as a code-base, with ongoing development to existing features, and major features yet to be decided. Meeting with some of the engineers, it struck me that there was this thing that would be called Java SE 6 (actually we called it something else back then), and we didn't even know what it would be, but we did know precisely how we'd get there. And how we were getting there (and why the O'Reilly editors were at the meeting) was that it was to be an open-source development project on java.net, one which has been offering binary and source drops since late 2004.

And as of today, Java SE 6 is final.

So how did it work out? Probably the best sign of success is that that there were a number of outside contributors contributing code -- check out a podcast interview from the java.net booth at JavaOne in which I spoke with Brian Harry, Jesse Sterr, and Andy Tripp about their experiences contributing to JDK 6.

So, before we turn our focus to JDK 7, let's take a minute to congratulate everyone who contributed to this major new release. After all, there's a lot in JDK 6. Its major new features are described in JSR-270, and include integrated web services, scripting language support, more desktop API's (including the famous SwingWorker), a compiler API, pluggable annotations, Swing L&F improvements, LCD subpixel rendering, XML digital signature API's, JDBC 4.0, and more.

What are you waiting for? If you're on a supported platform, go download...

Also in Java Today, Brian Leonard's blog Java On Bare Metal features photos and a brief recap of a Sun SPOT demo at the Connecticut JUG's Holiday Party: " We were lucky to get guest speaker Angela Caicedo all the way from Sydney Australia. Angela "stopped by" on her from the Austin JUG to JavaPolis to talk about Sun SPOTs. JUG leader Ryan Cuprak did a great job of getting the word out to the robotics community as we had attendees drive over 90 miles to attend her talk."

A recent SDN article helps you Create Great-Looking GUIs With NetBeans IDE 5.5. "If you are a very skilled user interface (UI) developer who enjoys a challenge, you can write code manually to use a combination of layout managers to control precisely how components use their container space. Although the ability to lay out a GUI form by hand might win you the right to brag at the office, it is not always the best use of your time. In many situations, you can save time and effort by using a visual development environment to design and implement graphical forms."

Does your hosting provider not support WebStart or servlets but let you run scripts? In today's Forums, mthornton has a solution for serving up WebStart in the message PHP and JNLP download: "I recently acquired a little NAS device which also runs Apache and PHP. So I thought about hosting some WebStart applications on it. Like many cheap commercial services it doesn't allow much in the .htaccess file, and of course I can't use the JNLP download servlet as it doesn't run Java either. I found some simple suggestions that allow the correct MIME type to be supplied by using a bit of PHP at the beginning of the JNLP file, but that doesn't supply a timestamp nor does it allow versioned downloads. A few hours later and I have a PHP script which adds the timestamp, gives 304 responses if the client's file is already up to date, and can do versioned downloads (a bit more work needed on this bit). The current version also logs all the jnlp requests to a file on the web server. Is anyone interested in this?"

A Project Looking Glass release looms, as deronj declares LG is now feature frozen: "All of LG is now feature frozen for 1.0 GA. All parts: core and applications. After this point only P1 and P2 bugs can be fixed. You have until this coming Friday 12/15 to fix these bugs. After that point we will be hard frozen and we'll generate a release candidate for you to test."

qu0ll reports a Problem with Windows PLAF when switching PLAF: "I have found that if I use a custom table header then the UI that is selected when switching look and feels is incorrect for the Windows look and feel. Specifically, if I create a JTable using Ocean look and feel and then switch to Windows look and feel on a Windows XP machine at run time, the table header takes on the appearance of a Windows Classic header instead of a Windows XP header. Even when I simplify the custom header to little more than a default header the same problem happens."

Jacob Hookom has some thoughts about Class Metadata Caching in today's Weblogs. "With Annotations being popular and more dynamic frameworks, how can we efficiently cache associated Metadata/assignments per Class without causing ClassLoader and memory leaks?"

Evan Summers takes an inside look at Chris Oliver's JApplication for F3 Demos: "In 'Poor Man's Multi-VM' Chris Oliver discusses his JApplication class, which he uses for his awesome F3 demos. Let's walk through the code, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes"

Finally, Jacob Hookom digs in to JSF StateSaving and Compression: "The Sun JSF RI team (Ryan Lubke, etc) is constantly making enhancements to their project here on Java.net. One of the banes of JSF's architecture is StateSaving, so we ran some tests to see if there was room for improvement."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Java SE 6
• JOnAS 4.8 Stable
• Apache Rampart 1.1
• Apache WSS4J 1.5.1
• Geotools 2.2.2
• JasperAssistant 2.2.0
• mavenium Initial Release

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to the java.net News RSS feed.

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• December 11-14 - Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop - San Diego
• December 11-15 - JavaPolis 2006
• December 12-15 - J2EE Training Philippines
• January 18-19, 2007 - Code Mash

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

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