6u10 is out!

; Date: Tue Oct 21 2008

Tags: Java

We finally know the value for N in the equation 6uN .. N = 10. A set of slides have been posted discussing what's new. This release started out as Consumer JRE and became more, and more, and more, etc.. It's a relief to have this out in the public. The DLJ bundles for 6u10 are also available.

What does this mean?

It means that client side Java has been getting some long long long needed attention and improvement. There were years when, obviously, the attention was on server side Java and, obviously, client side Java suffered. It is a relief to have attention on client side issues because in truth Java was the first RIA platform (long before this term was invented by a different company) but it was hampered in playing a significant role in RIA by, uh, shortcomings in the client side (sigh). 6u10 fixes a lot of issues and enables the underlying graphics changes needed for JavaFX.

But what does this mean for the OpenJDK project? As was pointed out in an openjdk.java.net mailing list a couple days ago, 6u10 represents a proprietary fork of code we're working on opening. Um, well, okay, uh, that's certainly true from one point of view. As good as the new features in 6u10 are it is a split between the JDK and OpenJDK, and unfortunately it's still unknown if/when we'll be able to move that code into open source. There was a sequence of great conversation in (web.archive.org) September on the discuss@openjdk.java.net list in which we made it clear that no decision has been made about if/when/where/how the new stuff in 6u10 would be made open source. Please stay tuned and maybe we'll have good open news relatively soon.

Source: (web.archive.org) weblogs.java.net

About the Author(s)

(davidherron.com) 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.