Graham Hamilton's Blog

J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) is out!

J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) is out!

The J2SE 5.0 final bits are now available at http://java.sun.com/j2se/5.0/download.jsp

And there is a variety of news about the release on java.sun.com.

The JCP Executive Committee approved the last 12 Tiger JSRs on September 14th. Less formally, but just as importantly, we then received our official blessing from the J2SE Quality Assurance team that we meet all the release criteria and are ready to go. Yesterday we did the final round of formal release approvals inside of Sun, including things like getting formal approval from the product support team that they believe the product is ready to ship and they are ready to support it.

Overall release quality is looking extremely good. The QA team runs some heavy-duty stress tests, where the "pass" criteria is that the systems stay up for a certain number of days. Well, at this point all those tests systems have been running for five weeks and they look like staying up until we decide to pull the power cord. Happiness!

Tiger has been a big release and it is great to see it ship. There have been hundreds of contributors, from across the world, and across the industry. Many many thanks to everyone who has contributed, either through helping to develop the new APIs in the JCP, or through contributing to the implementation, or through helping to test and stabilize the release. It has been a big effort but it has been well worth it.

Now on to Mustang and Dolphin! For details on the release plans for J2SE post-tiger take a look at Mark Reinhold's blog on the New Release Model.

                                                  - Graham

Comments

• Great!

  Now where's the version for Mac OSX ? If the source were available I could build it myself ...

  Anybody know if Apple has a release in the works? How's James Gosling using Tiger (he works with a Mac, yes?)

  Posted by: aaston on September 30, 2004 at 05:06 AM

• 
  @aaston:
  If the source of Sun's Windows, Linux and Solaris versions was available (which it is, under SCSL) you could build the MacOS X version?
  Are you sure you'd be happy with a Hotspot VM that generates x86 (or Sparc) code at runtime? Not to mention the AWT Peers using GDI/Motif/X11/... instead of Cocoa (or Carbon APIs), or all the other OS-specific code.

  
  murphee
  

  Posted by: murphee on September 30, 2004 at 05:54 AM

• You're right ... it would have to be an open source distribution, with Apple participating for the Mac specific bits ...

  Posted by: aaston on September 30, 2004 at 06:34 AM

• Well... even if it was an Open Source version where Apple maintains the Mac parts... the new features would still have to be ported (or at least the platform adapted to support the new features. Of course... Apple, right now, is busy working on a 1.5 Version of their Java implementation, and test versions will surely be released when they are deemed ready.
  This wouldn't progress any faster if the source code was open...
  Sure... if the Apple JVM was Open Source and their engineers would use a public accessible (read) CVS repository, you could probably download their current versions... although if they released early alpha/beta/... releases, it'd be quite the same (I assume that anything before that wouldn't be to usable or representative of the end product anyways).

  Posted by: murphee on September 30, 2004 at 06:58 AM

• Ok. Everybody chant: Mac... Mac... Mac... Mac...

  Sadly, it will be next year before we see a Mac version of JDK 1.5....

  Scott

  Posted by: scottganyo on September 30, 2004 at 07:07 AM

• A preview of Tiger on OS X is available on the developer previews of Tiger (OS X 10.5)

  Posted by: konz on September 30, 2004 at 08:24 AM

• A preview on the next OS release is not good enough for Apple to provide.

  Java 1.5 should be made available for OSX 10.3 ... I will definitely upgrade to 10.4 WHEN it comes out, but I should NOT have to wait for a new OS just to get a new version of Java.

  Either Sun needs to get involved and provide OSX releases, or Apple needs to step up better on this ... it's the one HUGE detriment of doing Java development on OSX.

  Posted by: benjc on September 30, 2004 at 12:14 PM

• I'll chime in as a mac-head as well, but I think that I can safely live with 1.4.2 for at least six months. My group develops primarily desktop applications, so at this time my interest in the new version of Java is to determine that it doesn't break anything.

  Posted by: duanegran on September 30, 2004 at 12:20 PM

• When will the source be released? I hope it doesn't take as long as it did for prior releases. Also it would be nice if they released updated source for update releases, the 1.4.2 source is only available for 1.4.2fcs, while 1.4.2_05 is the current release.

  http://wwws.sun.com/software/communitysource/j2se/java2/index.html

  Posted by: aw on September 30, 2004 at 03:12 PM

• Where's the 64bit Linux build that's compatible with Intel EM64T machines, that's what I'm wondering!

  The amd64 binaries don't work on Intel EM64T machines.

  Posted by: robdaemon on September 30, 2004 at 10:04 PM

• That's the way Apple does it and always has. New JVMs are released only for new OS versions.

  For example (version numbers might be off as I use no Mac) 10.3 has 1.4.2, 10.2 has 1.4.1, etc.
  So 10.5 will have 1.5.0 (oops, 5.0).
  It's their way of forcing users to buy an OS upgrade (or one of the ways).

  If you want the current release, use another platform (meaning Windows, Linux or Solaris).

  We're using AIX on our servers, any idea when IBM will release a 5.0 JVM for that? Until they do, we can't use 5.0 except for testing and familiarisation.

  Posted by: jwenting on October 01, 2004 at 12:02 AM

• I'm a Mac user too and I think it's a shame that they haven't released anything yet. However.... lest this turns into a Mac love-fest, let's not forget the big news is the release of Java 5. I had a few teething problems with the early betas, but as time progressed it got more and more solid. The performance is superb. Gone are the days when Java programmers had to feel like second-class citizens. One thing I will say is that Sun needs to work on optimizations on their own hardware. Java now flies on Wintel (not really there on the Mac yet) but it can be sluggish on Solaris. Graham?

  Posted by: dgriffiths on October 01, 2004 at 09:34 AM

• I would like to see support for the Intel EM64T line of processors. The AMD64 vesion doesn't work. Apparently this is due to 3dnow specific code. Is support for the EM64T really that difficult?

  Posted by: bensoft on October 03, 2004 at 11:55 PM

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