Recently we made
Java SE 6 update 10 available for beta testing. Beta testing is a period in product release cycles where testing is taken to people outside the product team, and those "external" testers bang on it with their applications and let the product team know what's wrong (or not).
There is a lot of exciting stuff in 6u10 (formerly known as 6uN) .. there is a lot more here than the typical update release. Unlike most update releases where the work is limited to critical fixes, for 6u10 the changes are pretty dramatic, will be affecting a lot of things, which leaves us wanting to hear about regressions or other kinds of bugs we may have created along the path of getting to 6u10.
(um.. before the wags get ahold of what I just wrote -- any time you write new code it's common to write some bugs as well)
Let's go over some of the new features:-
Java Deployment Toolkit:- hooboy the description is pretty hairy but says a few interesting things. "allows developers to easily deploy applets and applications to a large variety of clients with JavaScripts.... makes it possible to automatically install Java Platform for Java Plug-in applets and Java Web Start applications. The script exposes a single object, named deployJava" and the deplyJava object has a buncha useful functions to reduce the complexity of deploying an applet across multiple browsers.
The Java Kernel (
FAQ) makes for a tiny Java platform which can be more quickly downloaded & installed while still allowing the full Java SE platform to be available, requiring downloads of missing pieces as required.
The
next generation Java plugin looks really cool and ought to drastically improve applet and javawebstart functionality and behavior. It is a ground-up reimplementation of the venerable plugin which uses a more intelligent architecture which immediately fixes several outstanding glaring bugs and problems. I think that while in most cases incremental improvements and bug fixes are good, there are times where it's better to just start over from scratch and that this is one of those times.
The most critical part of 6u10 to test is this new plugin.
David Herron:
David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
