Java 6 Released, Did you Notice?
December 12th, 2006I came across a mention on Digg.com about Java 6 being released. The official press release shows that it was released yesterday. Yet, I am not seeing any mention of the new release at major news sources like CNN and ABC News. I cannot even tell if Sun had a launch event for this release. The mere fact that the news did not hit Digg.com until the day after should be an indication that this was not considered a major event by many.
After all, it is the first release under an open source license and includes a great deal of performance improvements and bug fixes. I remember in November of 2005 there were coordinated launch events for .NET 2.0 and the release was covered in all of the major news outlets. It was a big deal. And Microsoft did a great job with getting the word out which included free training sessions to get developers on board. And in just less than 1 year most .NET projects have moved past .NET 1.1 and are now using Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. The push worked to convince everyone to get up to date.
The contrast makes me wonder if Sun is OK with developers sticking with older Java releases for as long as they like. It appears to me that most Java projects are still using Java 1.4. It is partially due to the fact that Java is generally used in large shops likes banks and insurance companies which do not jump on the latest software releases and instead wait for more stable releases. One Java blogger noted that the lack of a Java 1.5.1 release may have slowed adoption. Instead Sun chose to release 6 updates to 1.5 instead of releasing 1.5.1 bump which could have increased adoption. Regardless, now many teams are going to be 2 major releases behind the current Java release.
Will these teams now move to Java 6? Where is all of the fanfare for Java 6? Does anyone care? And if you do care, what applications do you personally use besides the IDE?
December 14th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
While I agree with you that there was not a lot of noise about the release, I think there are some very exciting things in Java 6. One of the big ones is the inclusion of a full-blown pluggable implementation of a Scripting framework.
I would say at best it's a mixed blessing that there are still a lot of people using older versions. Most people are up to 1.4, but why upgrade if things work? I'm glad that Sun has continued to support (even if only peripherally) all of the old versions for so long. People/companies can then upgrade based on merit, need and cost as opposed to just jumping to the latest thing.
December 14th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
I agree with you that it is useful to upgrade when and only when there is a tangible reason to do so. The .NET and Java camps are diverging a lot more lately than they were 2 years ago when everyone was saying C# was just Java with a few changes so a direct comparison is not what it once was. But when .NET 2.0 was launched it included new language and framework features, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 which were all augmented the platform with the goal of making the developers work day easier. The reasons to upgrade were compelling. I know I cannot expect the same from the Java community, but it would be great to see Sun work more closely with the likes of IBM, JetBrains, the Eclipse team and the strongest open source projects (Apache) to target a major release date with a significant beta testing period so that a release date can be targeted and then work towards adding IDE support for the new features as well as prepare training material for the community. With all of the great new features available in Java 6 it will be too bad that many teams will not even move to adopt it.