Mark Reinhold's Blog

Tigers and Mustangs and Dolphins, Oh My!

Tiger is done.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Comments

• First off, I want to congratulate the Sun team on a job well done. Once Apple adopts this version I'll begin making more use of it, but in the meantime, do you mind if I nit pick something a little?

  Is there a version number czar of sorts at Sun who might make an effort to simplify the version numbering of this stuff? I'm perfectly happy calling it Java 1.5 or Java 5, but what causes me, and others, frustration is the dual name. In my previous life as a Solaris admin I experienced the same problem with the operating system versions.

  Posted by: duanegran on September 30, 2004 at 08:25 AM

• Well, thanx for the 1.5 release, we see a big (speed) improvement here under linux....

  For the release schedule, reading your post, I was first thinking: "wot ?? no .x releases ?? What's the f... are they doing ??"

  Then my reflection goes further and I came to: "Cool,
  - 1 month less to see bugfix releases
  - 6 to 12 months less for the real releases with new features in them !"

  If the feature releases don't slip, let me say that's cool and I think this release schedule will be much better

  Gérard

  Posted by: gcollin on October 01, 2004 at 05:59 AM

• I think that is fine. About the dual name mentioned by duanegran. All the community knows java 5 as Tiger. It was a great idea of Sun, to make a more effective marketing. The new java is knowed as Mustang and not 6.0. Everybody says Mustang. I like this.

  Regards,

  Pietro.

  Posted by: mpietro on April 29, 2005 at 07:25 AM

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