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.