Mark Reinhold's Blog: September 2004 Archive

Whew! I can just about hear the collective sigh of relief from everyone, both inside and outside of Sun, who contributed to this amazing product. We hope you enjoy working with it. As I've said before, I think Tiger is the highest-quality JDK that we've ever built -- and I've been helping to build these things since JDK 1.1.

This seems an appropriate time to look forward, and in particular at some changes that we're making to the J2SE release model.

The current model has three kinds of releases:

Feature releases are the big ones (1.3, 1.4, ~~1.5~~ 5.0), with tons of bug fixes and lots of new features. These have generally been about 24-36 months apart.
Maintenance releases, the so-called "dot-dot" releases (1.4.1, 1.4.2, etc.), have lots of bug fixes but no new API features. Lately these have been about 8-10 months apart.
Update releases, the so-called "underscore" releases (1.4.2_01, ~~1.5.0_01~~ 5.0 update 1), which contain a very small number of bug fixes (typically around 100) carefully chosen to meet urgent customer needs. Sun has shipped these about every 3-4 months.

Going forward we're going to simplify this model and increase the rate at which we ship releases. In particular:

Feature releases will ship every 18-24 months. This will allow the platform to evolve more rapidly so as to better meet the needs of the developer community and compete with .NET.
There won't be any more maintenance releases. Starting with Tiger (5.0) there won't be any more releases the size of 1.4.1 and 1.4.2, i.e., with 1500-2000 bug fixes. There still might be a release called "5.1", but it will just be a special update release.
Update releases will ship every 2-3 months. This will make it possible for critical bug fixes to be delivered to customers in a more timely manner.

Changing the release model is not something we've done lightly; this is the result of several months of investigation and many conversations with partners and developers in the community. A couple additional expected benefits of these changes are:

Releases will more likely ship on time. Within the J2SE engineering organization we've long wrestled with the difficult choice of making the current maintenance release as perfect as possible versus working on great new features for the next big feature release. This conflict has been the proximate cause of many schedule slips over the years. The new release model finally resolves this fundamental tension: J2SE engineers will, by default, always be working on the next feature release. There will be times when they're asked to fix a critical bug in an update release, and even rarer times when some nontrivial work (e.g., to improve performance) will be done in an update release, but these will be the exceptions rather than the rule.
Release adoption will improve. The existing medium-sized maintenance releases have long been a big adoption barrier. Due to the level of change in these releases many users have only been confident enough to adopt them after requalifying all of their applications -- in other words, by treating them much like feature releases in terms of testing. Most users are confident enough in the update releases to just "drop them in" without doing a lot of testing; now they'll be able to do so for a longer time in between feature releases.

These are not easy changes to make. We're still in the middle of figuring out a bunch of the details, so reality over the next couple of years might not exactly match what I've described above. Overall, however, we think that the improved focus and increased agility of the new release model will bring big benefits to the platform and to the Java community.

Tough and Trustworthy Tigers

Posted by mreinhold on September 01, 2004 at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Tiger Release Candidate shipped earlier today.

Even more amazingly, our QA team is happy with it!

Our hard-working QA team recently presented a summary of their results based on the near-final builds of Tiger. Overall this is looking to be the most stable and reliable JDK that we've ever shipped. Here are the highlights of their report:

Applet compatibility We test a set of over 400 applets, nearly all of which are external, to make sure that they run as well on Tiger as they do on any other popular VM, most especially the old and somewhat quirky VM from Microsoft. 97% of these tests pass, which is a much higher fraction than for any previous JDK release. The few failures are mostly due to applets that are relying on behavior that's outside the scope of the J2SE specification.
Reliability We run a set of five large server-class applications, including Sun's own application server, another well-known application server, and Tomcat, on some big iron under heavy load to see how long they stay up. As of this writing they've been up and running continuously for 28 days -- at some point we'll have to decide when to shut them off. This is a much longer uptime than we've achieved in previous releases.
Conformance The 1.5 JCK (Java Compatibility Kit) contains a whopping 45,194 tests (for comparison, the 1.4.2 JCK had a mere 27,309 tests). Tiger passes all of them.
Regression tests These are tests written by development engineers to make sure that a bug gets fixed and stays fixed. 99.7% of the tests in the regression-test suite pass. We've carefully reviewed the few failures, and in all cases we decided that the risk of fixing them at this late stage outweighs their relatively small end-user impact.
Functional tests These are tests written by quality engineers to test the overall functionality of the JDK. 99.7% of the tests in the functional-test suite pass. As with the failing regression tests, fixing the few remaining failures is just not worth the risk right now.

A total of 8,002 features, enhancements, and bug fixes were integrated into Tiger, so when I step back and think about it this way I'm fairly amazed that it's working so well.

Tiger is the highest-quality JDK that we've ever built. Is it perfect? No, of course not. There are no doubt still some bugs lurking, but hopefully none is too serious. If Tiger quality is important to you then please download and test the release candidate and let us know right away if something's wrong. The next couple of weeks are our last chance to fix any thermonuclear, hair-on-fire, sky-is-falling showstopper bugs.

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