Last Friday we posted the first of the Tiger Snapshot releases to the web. Build 55 is available right now, and the plan is to post each weekly build until we reach the Release Candidate (RC) build. Unlike our milestone releases these builds receive only limited testing, so they're not for the feint of heart. If you'd like to live on the bleeding edge, though, then these builds are for you.

Our main motivation for doing the snapshot releases is to ensure that the FCS release of J2SE 1.5.0 is of the highest possible quality. The end-game of a big software release, as anyone who's survived one knows, is a particularly tense time during which every change is closely scrutinized, lots of hard decisions must be made, and there's never enough testing. By posting each weekly build on the web we're hoping to increase the level of external testing and thereby improve the quality of the final result.

A second motivation for doing the snapshot releases is to gain some more experience with the "release early, release often" development style that's been so successful in the Open Source community. The Tiger Snapshot model isn't exactly "release early", since these are post-Beta 2 builds, and it's not quite as "often" (i.e., nightly) as some projects, but it's a more aggressive one than we've ever tried before. If this experiment goes well then we'll consider releasing even earlier and oftener in future releases.