|
Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0: Ready for Migration James Gosling and Mark Reinhold Invite Adopters
Few people have as complete a sense as Sun Vice President and Sun Fellow James Gosling of just how ready for migration the JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (JavaTM SE 5.0) is. He and Java SE Chief Engineer Mark Reinhold recently shared their views with Janice J. Heiss. Gosling, in particular, deems the version eminently ready for use. Gosling reserves great praise for the Java Community ProcessSM (JCPSM) saying that, without its help, Sun would not have produced as mature a solution as Java SE 5.0 turned out to be. "If there's a misunderstood story about Tiger, it's that some people seem to believe that Tiger is something that Sun did alone. But it's probably the most intensely collaborative effort we've ever done," he said. So far, Gosling averred, bug counts on the new release are reasonably low, a circumstance that he attributes to Sun's efforts to provide support for Tiger with the NetBeansTM IDE. For that reason, Gosling encourages users to migrate to 5.0 since he predicts that there will be little need for a 5.1 version. He has every confidence that 5.0 will work well in mission-critical enterprise applications. The only caution he voiced has to do with users of 1.4 who might have written a bug fix that will likely break when the workaround does not encounter the bug it was written to correct. The work Sun performed at the tool level inside NetBeans should even make complexity less of a problem than it might otherwise have been, Gosling continued, saying "...the tool can support transparent development in which developers are not exposed to a lot of the application but get a more standard boilerplate." Some users complain that Sun has failed to address the issue of generics adequately. Gosling's response is that Sun simply could not find a way to extend generics to primitive types and still come up with a system that is simple and fast. He also conceded that he was not entirely happy with the autoboxing feature of Java SE 5.0. Gosling also confidently suggested that developers who elect to use Java Foundation Classes/Swing (JFC/Swing) will find it more satisfactory than Eclipse's Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), because JFC/Swing has more features, even though these can make using the solution incorrectly more likely. He noted, too, that reducing characters in the enhanced for loop was a tradeoff that simplifies the use of iterators but also introduces the problem of verboseness (complexity) with its accompanying amount of boilerplate code, which must be rendered accurately. Mark Reinhold, Sun chief engineer on the project, commented on the issue of startup speed, noting that there had been improvements, though startup time bears a direct relationship to the time required for loading the application. The improvements are the result of a new class-data sharing feature, he said, that "pre-bakes" commonly used platform classes into a heap image and saves them into a special file. When the Java HotSpotTM VM starts up, it is not necessary to load, parse and link classes individually since they have can be mapped into memory. Reinhold also called for bug reports from users who find execution time with Tiger slower than with 1.4.
Answering a user who complained of the necessity to load JARs each time the application is loaded, which would render 5.0 unsuitable for mission-critical applications, Reinhold responded with the suggestion that either a bug was involved or that the user's server was not properly configured. But he, like Gosling, did feel 5.0 was ready for mission-critical implementations.
[...read more...]
From the latest issue:
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Friendly
Email this article
(Tiger is) probably the most intensely collaborative effort we've ever done. 
Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0: Ready for Migration
Copyright © 1998-2009 System News, Inc.
