Mark Reinhold's Blog

Mustang Beta Blog Carnival!

After nearly eighteen months of effort within Sun, the Java Community Process, and the wider JDK Community, the Mustang Beta Release is now available.

In contrast to the source and binary snapshots that we’ve been shipping for over a year, the formal beta release has been through many weeks of intensive testing—and a tiny little bit of last-minute bug-fixing—in order to produce a release that’s somewhat more polished. If you’ve chosen to avoid the riskier snapshot builds then now is the perfect time to have a look at Mustang, make sure your existing code still compiles and runs, and try out the new features. Please do let us know what you think or—even better—get involved and help us make Mustang a great release for the entire community!

To help celebrate the beta release I’m hosting a “blog carnival” right here on this page. Over the next couple of days many members of the Java SE development community will post blog entries about the work they’ve been doing for the Mustang release. As entries are posted I’ll add them here for convenient reference; alternatively you can get the very latest blog entries via Planet JDK, which also provides RSS and Atom syndication feeds.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen…

• Chet Haase channels Julie Andrews and waxes poetic about his favorite Mustang features.

• Brian Doherty reflects on the meaning of the word “beta” in this modern age of continuous integration and snapshot releases, and talks about some of the performance improvements—and pitfalls—in the release.

• Chris Hegarty explains how he fixed a high-vote bug in the HTTP keep-alive implementation.

• Sundar shows how to use DTrace on Solaris to generate a mixed-mode stack trace whenever an exception is thrown.

• Jaya Hangal talks about LDAP timeouts and connection pooling in JNDI.

• Scott Violet takes a break from big-picture application architecture to highlight some of the smaller UI features in Mustang.

• Peter von der Ahé talks about the compiler plugins—known more formally as annotation processors—that are enabled by the Tree API, JSR 269, and JSR 199.

• Sean Mullan summarizes the new security features in the release.

• Shannon Hickey introduces the new support for choosing drop actions in the Swing Drag and Drop API.

• Mandy Chung shows off six techniques for diagnosing memory-usage problems.

• Madhura Dudhgaonkar explains why Mustang Beta is based on the relatively ancient build 59 even though the latest snapshot release is build 71.

• David Herron posts a helpful reminder of the Mustang Regressions Challenge, in which you can win a slick new Opteron-based Ultra 20 workstation if you find a really egregious regression. (No purchase necessary, void where prohibited by law, etc.)

• Éamonn McManus summarizes the new JMX features.

• Chris Campbell argues with himself over whether or not the beta build is too passé, and also takes stock of the work that he and his team have been doing.

• Preveen Mohan talks about some of the new AWT features in Mustang from the standpoint of a QA engineer.

• Naoto Sato describes the new Locale Sensitive Services SPI.

• Danny Coward muses on how the new Compiler API is going to keep javac up and running 24/7/365.

• Penni Henry, the new Mustang Program Manager, reflects on the quality of the release from the perspective of someone relatively new to the team.

• Gauri Sharma discusses the ongoing work on the Mustang JCK (Java Compatibility Kit).

• Jon Masamitsu wonders whether those who want a truly “pauseless” garbage collector would be willing to pay for it in the currency of time and space.

• Andreas Sterbenz shows how to plug NSS into the Java PKCS#11 crypto provider in order to improve performance on Linux and Windows.

• Finally, in my other blog you can find a description of the new class-path wildcard feature.

That’s it for now!

Questions and answers

To answer a few of the questions that’ve been asked in the comments below:

• The beta release is based on weekly build 59 from way back in November 2005. Madhura talks a bit more about why it’s so “old.”

• Every bug fixed in a later snapshot build will stay fixed for the final release unless a problem with the fix is found in the interim and no alternative solution can be devised.

• The evaluation license is a bit, well… baroque. We’re talking to our legal team to see if the part about having to notify Sun can be removed.

Comments

• Great news. Congratulations.
  The beta is based on which weekly build ? How the community can participate on voting which bugs is already fixed in a later weekly build to be back ported to the java 6 ? Or can we stay calm and see every bug fixed for mustang weekly builds to be part of final java 6 release ? Thanks.

  Posted by: claudio on February 15, 2006 at 02:24 AM

• cool, congrats, good luck for the relase.

  cheers,
  dalibor topic

  Posted by: robilad on February 15, 2006 at 04:29 AM

• Well, I installed and see it has "build 1.6.0-beta-b59g", so I suppose it is build 59 which is from Nov, 04. From that time, there were important fixes, I expect to be on final release.

  Posted by: claudio on February 15, 2006 at 06:07 AM

• One issue with the license...

  "6.4 Upon termination or expiration of this Agreement,
  Licensee will immediately cease use of and destroy
  Licensed Software, any copies thereof and provide to
  Sun a written statement certifying that Licensee has
  complied with the foregoing obligations. "

  So, after 90 days it expires and we all have to write to Sun stating that we destroyed our copy. I get that in the case of termination... but expiration?

  Posted by: darcy on February 15, 2006 at 09:06 AM

• my favourite Mustang license bit is in 5.0:

  "[..] Any test results, error
  data, reports or other information, or materials
  provided to Sun relating to the Licensed Software
  ("Feedback") is the exclusive property and
  Confidential Information of Sun. Licensee hereby
  assigns all Feedback to Sun at no cost to Sun."

  I am all for sharing, but please ask for a BSD-ish license, rather then attempting to claim other people's copyrights squarely, and exclusively. That's not nice.

  thanks,
  dalibor topic

  Posted by: robilad on February 16, 2006 at 06:05 AM

• The license has been updated, as Ray Gans explains over in the forums.

  Posted by: mreinhold on February 27, 2006 at 09:02 PM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.