Mark Reinhold's Blog

Mustang Maintenance Review 1

Yesterday we posted the first Maintenance Review for the Mustang (Java SE 6) release.

This review describes the details of all the changes and additions made to the Java SE platform specification in Mustang that aren’t themselves specified by their own JSRs. Small enhancements such as the new java.awt.Desktop class, e.g., are specified in this maintenance review, whereas a big new feature like the compiler API is specified by its own JSR, 199.

The maintenance review also contains countless small corrections to the platform specification. The bulk of these are summarized in a set of API difference pages which show the changes made between Tiger and Mustang.

This is just the first Mustang maintenance review, reflecting the content of the first beta release. There’ll be another MR around the time of the second beta release, and a final MR for the release candidate. The second and third MRs are expected to be much smaller than the first.

The past is prologue

How is it that we’re doing a maintenance review for Mustang when Mustang hasn’t even been finished yet?

Good question! In fact technically this is a JCP Maintenance Review of the Tiger (J2SE 5.0) specification, JSR 176. This is just an artifact of the way that the Java Community Process works. The smaller, non-JSR changes and additions in the Tiger release, likewise, were covered in maintenance reviews of the Merlin (J2SE 1.4) specification, JSR 59.

Comments welcome!

The formal MR-1 period ends in thirty days, but you can send feedback to the e-mail address listed in the review materials at any time.

Comments

• Good news. Thank you for helping turn J2SE into an open, living standard, rather than something that's happening behind closed doors, and in particular thank you for not slapping one of the usual NDA-like license agreements that prohibit discussion of the details with anyone who does not agree to the license.

  Sun has had a pretty bad record with J2SE JSR transparency, I am glad
  that something seems to happening, at last, after 10 years. Let's hope it will take less than 10 years for the actual JDK community outside Sun to be able to fully participate in the process, without having NDAs slapped on them.

  cheers,
  dalibor topic
  

  Posted by: robilad on March 23, 2006 at 03:25 AM

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