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Re: J2SE 1.5 Beta 1 for MacOS X ?

On Feb 5, 2004, at 9:32 AM, email@hidden wrote:

email@hidden wrote:
| Recently, Sun released a beta version of it's new J2SE 1.5.
| At work I played around with the new stuff for a while, on an
| old Ultra-10 box. The features they added are quite impressive
| and interesting. But...
|
| When will there be a MacOS X release of the new JDK ?

The answer is the same as for everything else from Apple: when it's done. Apple doesn't reveal schedules. Period.

What *is* it with Java people? Java 1.4.2 is *just* out, and already people are complaining because 1.5 isn't in their hands. This happens for every single release. Java seems to be the only environment where people are positively *eager* to limit the customer base by building software that can't possibly run on anything but the latest, cutting-edge version. (Yet Apple gets condemned for not supporting 1.4 back to OS 9. Go figure.)

I can answer that for my clients. They are mostly biotech, with a few business app clients to fill in the corners, and they adopt technology at a wide range of paces. Their primary customers are internal, or are webapp users where the jdk is on the server anyway. Thus, it is not so much limiting the customer base as trying to control costs on custom development projects.

There are two critical dates for an Apple release - first dev preview which will let us compile and test code under 1.5, albeit with bugs, and first customer release, before which we CANNOT ship a 1.5 app to a Mac using client no matter what they want to pay us.

That first dev preview is unimportant until a client actually starts a test 1.5 project.

In the past, some test/migration projects have started during the beta period. (For example - one project tested their database persistence kit with a beta to determine a re-engineering budget six months later.) Other clients did not start their migration testing until after the new JDK shipped. In the main, though, there is usually at least one "test our stuff/see if we can avoid writing expensive code" project sometime around the first release candidate from Sun. Sometimes, we have to give up these projects, because Apple does not have a JDK for us. Other times, we can haul out VPC or my old pentium 450, and get through the small scale test. 1.3.x was this way for us at one client - Apple had the jdk for us long before the clients were ready.

Those test projects sometimes find a stopship bug in the beta, or even in the .0 release, that says "no migration, no how." This is why a different client waited until 1.4.1 to migrate. All their developers were using 1.3.0 the day it shipped, and had migrated their users to it within two weeks because they had good luck during the Sun beta.

Having a dev preview of 1.5 becomes quite critical once Sun has an official 1.5.0 release, as there will definitely be projects a-running by that point. Days lost there are a pain - even though the customers will not see a product for perhaps a year, the developers need to be working early.

The public release is less clear. Again, if the clients move to 1.5.0, we need to be there pretty fast, but if the clients wait until 1.5.1, we do not have to have a public jdk for them to use right away. Given how many bugfixes have gone into the .1 and .2 releases of 1.4 from Sun, it seems likely that 1.5.0 is going to need a bit of seasoning. That said, generics are compelling.

In conclusion - it is hard for me to say what the priorities would be if I were at the helm. I know that some of my clients would be re-assured by some kind of NDA 1.5 seed early, as it implies an early ship date, and gives them more options. Others will not care. Personally, I really hope Apple has a dev preview or beta before release of 1.5, but I am not sure how long before is needed, as the clients have not yet started their own test projects.

Scott
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