John O'Conner's Blog: February 2006 Archive

Curious about the Mustang Collaboration effort, I decided to give it a try. Sun is a big company, they're asking for public collaboration on a huge software project, and I wondered if public submissions would actually find their way into the product.

I found a bug in Mustang, fixed it, and submitted it to the Mustang development team. Today, I'm happy to report that the fix has been integrated into build #70 of the binary and source distributions.

This has been a fun public experiment with Mustang collaboration. I started this on Sept 28, 2005. Having plenty of distractions, I spent a couple months to find the easiest, most insignificant bug. Obviously, if you're doing real work that's important to you, you'll find a perfectly good bug much more quickly. It took just an hour or so to get the source and set up on my PC. The fix itself took 30 seconds. I diffed the source and sent in the diff describing the fix. A reply from Sun engineers came within a week or so of my submission. Finally, the fix itself showed up in build #70.

I know that others haven't been so fortunate to have their fixes integrated. I can't answer why not...I simply don't know the answer. However, I'm comfortable saying that I had success testing the Mustang collaboration process. I submitted my fixes as an external collaborator and followed the process like any individual contributor would. I like to think that the process worked for me like it would for anyone else. I wish you all success getting your own fixes into Mustang.

This concludes my experiment. I encourage you to submit your fixes too. If you're curious how I navigated the process, you can read the steps of my own successful contribution:

Get involved and have fun!

Using the Desktop API in Java SE 6 (Mustang)

Posted by joconner on February 07, 2006 at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Java platform has come a long way in its effort to minimize the difference between the performance and integration of native applications and Java applications. Java SE 6, code-named Mustang, continues to narrow the gap with system tray functionality and the new Desktop API. In brief, the new Desktop API allows Java applications to interact with the default applications associated with specific file types on the host platform.

Curious about this new API? The article Using the Desktop API in Java SE 6 (Mustang) describes the API and includes a simple DesktopDemo app with source code. Take a look, give it a try, and tell me what you think.

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