Graham Hamilton's Blog

June 2004 Archives

Tiger's Children

I'm up at JavaOne today. As usual, it's a blast.

We brought a gorgous baby white tiger on stage to help us kick-off the "Tiger" section of this morning's general session. He was great fun and really mellow. He had got up really early to come to Moscone, so he was quite sleepy by the time he came on stage. He had been more active during our prep session when he was gently play-biting on my ankle through my jeans and trying to decide if he liked the flavor. (He's young enough that he's only just starting to figure out the whole teeth thing and he hasn't yet figured out that engineers are actually edible.)

Anyway, we've been talking a lot today about the J2SE Tiger release (now J2SE 5.0) which will ship this fall. But we've also been discussing some of our initial thinking for Mustang (6.0) and Dolphin (7.0).

Right now we're in early planning and we're talking to lots of Java partners, customers, and individual developers about what the priorities should be post-Tiger. We'll analyze and balance all that input and use it to help design our JSR proposals to the JCP. So right now, all of this is interim brain storming based on initial conversations and feedback.

Our initial thinking is that we probably want to try to get back into a slight faster release cadence. Tiger is a great release and has a lot of big new features, but it will ship about two and a half years after Merlin (1.4). We'd like to go back to shipping slightly smaller releases slightly more frequently. So we want to deliver the same volume of new features over time, but delivered on an eighteen month cycle rather than a 30 month cycle. (We have to balance between some people wanting to see features more quickly and other people not wanting to have to deal with too many new releases.)

So our current thinking is that the next two feature releases will be:

• Mustang (6.0) in spring 2006.
• Dolphin (7.0) in late 2007.

We typically like to define some driving themes for each releases. Right now the initial candidate themes for Mustang are:

• Compatibility, Stability, Quality!
  - This is virtually certain to be theme #1.
• Diagnosability, Monitoring & Management
  - Keep making it easier to identify and resolve application issues.
• XML & Web Services
  - Bundling SOAP web services support into J2SE.
• Ease-of-Development
  - Simplifying common tasks, polishing off rough edges.
• Java on the desktop
  - Including new desktop integration and data access ideas.
• Becoming more transparent
  - Provide more insight/feedback into JDK engineering.

We have lots of new feature ideas and we're accumulating many more as we talk with people.

We'd like your input.

If you are attending JavaOne, you can come to the "Tiger's Children" BOF on Tuesday at 7:30-9:30 pm in Moscone Room 105. This is intended to be an interactive session where we will mostly be in "listen" mode, to hear people's requirements.

We'll also be having a Tiger's Children session at the "Ask-the-Experts" pod in the JavaOne Pavilion on Wednesday 4:30-7:30, if you want to talk one-on-one.

For people not at JavaOne, we're putting up an online survey at http://java.sun.com/j2se/survey/index.jsp. The survey results will be tabulated and analyzed as part of the planning team's work. This is a great opportunity to provide input on the future of J2SE.

Be pragmatic: tell us both what and why. We often find it easier to meet a feature request if we understand the real underlying need!

                                                                         - Graham

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.