Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Java SE 6 Update N. Is that a real name now?

In what appears to be the latest installment in the naming saga of Java releases, Sun officially renamed the "Consumer JRE" to "Java SE 6 Update N". Originally pioneered by Ethan Nicholas, it had a few sexy names, such as Java Browser Edition, Java Kernel and lately Consumer JRE. And now the official name is out, ant it is the most unpalatable name for a Java release that i have ever heard.

The promise made by Sun at JavaOne 2005 about the new release schedule for JDK was simple - no more minor releases. Starting from JDK 5.0, there will be no longer .1, .2 and so on. Only bug fixes, named with small letter u. It worked with JDK 5.0, and it worked up until now with JDK 6.0 (or JavaSE 6.0 is the official terminology), which also sadly eliminated the nicknames for Java major and minor releases. So what is so different now?

With so many new features in the "Update N", it's not really a bug fix release. It's really a big major release, but marking it as such would make its adoption even more problematic. However, marking it as "Update N" doesn't make any sense at all. What does "N" stand for? Will there be any updates once it's released? Most certainly there will, we're already at update 12 for JDK 5.0. Will that be "N+1"? "N++"? "O"?

Why not admit the obvious? It is a big release with major new features, just like 1.4.2 was compared with 1.4 and 1.4.1. If you don't want to call it 7.0 (which it should really be), name it 6.5. Do you know how many syllables are there in the new name? Eight. How many syllables in "Silverlight"? Three. Apollo? Three. Flex and Flash? One. Make it sexy. Make it scream for headlines.

Comments

• I definitely agree. When this morning I read the blog titles in my aggregator, at a first sight I couldn't understand what was that... At a second glance, I thought they were just announcing the update (but not sure about what update would be ready), and only at the third read I understood there was something to download!

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on October 01, 2007 at 01:05 AM

• My guess is they are trying to avoid giving it a proper name so as not to mark it as an "official" release. Just speculation. But I would guess they want to get this in people's hands as quickly as possible, to gather feedback, before actually committing to it as a real code drop. Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on October 01, 2007 at 01:28 AM

• Same as pdoubleya. My understanding of this name is that it will be a released of the series 6, but it has no proper name yet, nor it is final. And seriously, considering what's inside this release, bitching about the name is just stupid.

  Posted by: gfx on October 01, 2007 at 04:01 AM

• When I saw this article linked from http://weblogs.java.net/ I thought it would discuss Java 6.0 Update 3 and beyond. "N" is the name we use for a number when we don't yet know what it is. We, as software developers, do *not* name official releases with that number.

  Sun needs to get on the ball with respect to naming. Dump the "1.6" business, bring back point releases, and just conform to the industry norms so we can all get back to developing software instead of figuring this out.
  

  Posted by: samkass on October 01, 2007 at 10:57 AM

• I'll just repeat what I wrote yesterday about this:

  Hey, Java SE 6 Update N. So we have yet another naming schema for Java SE. Great - not :-(

  How long will it take before we see "Java SE 6 Update N.OT, build 432, Patch 34, when the moon is in the sevenths house"? Ups, can't take to long, since we already have Java SE 6 Update N build 05.

  Who is making these product naming decisions at Sun? Please find him or her and ensure he or she gets proper medical treatment.
  

  Posted by: ewin on October 02, 2007 at 09:43 AM

• Hi Chet,
  this is really good news! Are there plans for 'Java SE 6 Update N' to also make the Java6 Splash-Screen API available to the WebStart environment?

  Posted by: aoberthuer on October 04, 2007 at 02:00 AM

• sorry; got the wrong blog... stupid me.

  Posted by: aoberthuer on October 04, 2007 at 03:37 AM

• Geeze, i'm glad people have the time to wring their hands over a name. The consumer could care less what it's named, they do on the other hand care that it works. So long as it works, it could be called "Ode to the Spaghetti Monster using a diatribe of vitriolic attitude used as input for a gothic industrial version of a bach requiem" ( for the acronym fiends, that's OTTSMUADOVAUAIFAGIVOABR) and the consumer would just say "Java". Hopefully, they will also say, Java, Done Deal, I want it, it's fast, it's hot, it works.

  Posted by: jayice on October 07, 2007 at 03:59 AM

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