Mark Reinhold's Blog

Mustang Release Contents (JSR 270): Early Draft Review

Just in time for the holidays!

The Early Draft Review version of the JSR 270 specification, which governs the content of the Java SE 6 “Mustang” release, is now available.

JSR 270 is an “Umbrella” JSR, so it doesn’t define specific features itself—instead it lists features defined in other JSRs, or in the concurrent maintenance review of the Java SE platform specification. As an improvement over past umbrella specifications, this time around we’ve augmented each feature description with non-normative links to the relevant draft Mustang javadoc as well as any associated JSRs or other material.

When reviewing this draft please keep in mind that the Umbrella JSR only covers the component JSRs and other big-ticket or highly-visible items in Mustang. Most smaller enhancements aren’t listed in the Umbrella JSR, though of course they will be covered in the maintenance review of the platform specification that’ll start around the time that the beta release of the reference implementation ships.

Mustang is still under development. The JSR 270 Expert Group has approved all of the features listed in the draft, and we expect to see all those features in the final release. It’s still possible, however, for a feature to be dropped if, for example, it turns out to be too difficult to implement. It’s also possible for new features to be added, given sufficient justification, though at this stage big changes to the overall shape of the release are pretty unlikely.

Comments on this draft are most welcome! The formal EDR period ends in sixty days, but you can send feedback to the e-mail address listed in the draft at any time.

Sneak Preview

Here’s a summary of the approved feature list sorted by area, component, and feature name. For more details please see the EDR specification.

You can check out the initial implementations of many—though not all—of these new features in the weekly snapshot builds of the reference implementation.

Comments

• No ConcurrentPriorityQueue?

  Posted by: gbarton on December 22, 2005 at 09:09 AM

• It would have been nice to see more support for the various PKCS standards in the sercurity area or at a bare minimum APIs for everything that keytool can do. This would include certificate creation and handling of certificate signing requests.

  Posted by: bondolo on December 25, 2005 at 10:52 AM

• I have lobied on forums as well for a layout (GroupLayout) to be added.
  C# has a great one, and even Flash 8.5 Run Time has a great layout. For Java 6 which will be deployed in '07 and '08 to required a 3rd party jar download for a layout (likely jGoooides ) is horible. I should be able to write a moderately complex UI that is manitainable w/o a 3rd party download.
  The currentl layouts, ex gridbag, are poor. In any eval of the 3 run time langs, Java would lose that major point, no good layout.

  .V

  ot: you can remove javascript if up to me.

  Posted by: netsql on January 01, 2006 at 08:07 AM

• GroupLayout should be bundled with JDK 6.0: after all Mustang it's alpha status, not beta,
  so you can definitely bundle the new layout manager. No excuses.
  

  Posted by: marcomanno on January 14, 2006 at 01:04 AM

• I second the request for a good layout manager.

  Posted by: anubis_1 on January 25, 2006 at 02:30 AM

• +1 for a good layout manager !!

  Posted by: sse on January 25, 2006 at 03:52 AM

• Thanks for keeping us updated!

  Posted by: paulrivers on January 25, 2006 at 07:16 AM

• Reflective access to parameter names is really welcome !
  Could you please show how to do it with Mustang API ...
  Expected to find a new method or something on class Method, but didn't ...

  Posted by: ndasriau on January 25, 2006 at 08:50 AM

• Hi,

  Are there any plans to include file system monitoring API (file/folder creation, removal, rename, etc) to Java platform?

  Like Commons VFS one, but using native methods on different operating systems (without polling):
  http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/vfs/apidocs/org/apache/commons/vfs/FileListener.html
  
  

  Posted by: artti on January 25, 2006 at 10:31 PM

• and how many new classes and methods does that add to the language?
  How much more rubbish to distribute to users that noone ever needs but looks nice on a marketing brochure?
  It could have been worse though, thanks for not listening to every irrate screaming demand to add someone's favourite pet feature.
  But the cheap step of getting rid of everything deprecated in 1.3 or earlier still hasn't been taken, which would be a major first step towards restoring the language to something lean.

  Posted by: jwenting on January 27, 2006 at 12:59 AM

• I would have liked to see an implementation of a PriorityQueue that uses a Fibonacci heap in addition to the (IIRC) binary heap implementation in Java 5. A Fib heap has better performance for inserting, which makes it more suitable for the A* pathfinding algorithm.

  Also, it's a minor point but it would be nice if the Arrays.binarySearch family of methods had alternative entry points that took initial low, high values instead of always searching the whole array. It's an incredibly tiny change. I don't know if it was felt that it would clutter up the API, or just if nobody ever thought of it.

  Re layouts: I think the people asking for this have been struggling with GridBag, which I have always considered to be a serious misfeature. I've never used GridBag, and never had any problem creating pleasing and professional UIs by simply nesting a few panes with the other, simpler layouts.

  Posted by: dconrad on February 02, 2006 at 10:44 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.