Java SE 6 Released

twofish writes "Sun has announced the availability of Java Standard Edition 6 final release. JSE6 now has dynamic language support. It comes pre-delivered with Netscape's Rhino, a Javascript engine, and the scripting project's home page documents many other available scripting languages, including awk, Jelly, Pnuts, Python, Ruby, and Scheme. In addition a lot of work has been done on the libraries and run-time compiler. The JIT has been improved, with better runtime analysis of program characteristics, giving notable performance improvements. Other improvements include better desktop support, improvements in Swing look and feel, Windows Vista support, and better diagnostic support (For example, profilers and debuggers can now attach to a running JVM without specifically using a debugging-capable configuration. For example, if a problem is found at run-time for a production server, a debugger can attach to it without restarting the server). Sun is also offering sixty days of free developer support for JSE 6 through their Developer Services program."

Is it any faster for client-side apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

While Java performs acceptably for server applications, it has traditionally been quite lousy when it comes to client-side development. A big problem with this was that their Swing toolkit is goddamn slow. I really don't know why, nor do I particularly care why. What I'm interested in is if anything has been done in Java SE 6 to improve the quality and performance of Swing, to the point that it's at least comparable to SWT. So has it?

Awesome

[NaCh0]

As if Java and Javascript weren't already confused enough.

Here goes a whole new round of n00b education.

Maybe on the plus side javascript will begin to suck less.

Downloads page still stupid

[PhrostyMcByte]

Kudos on the new release. I'm running Vista, so the support will be nice.

But as a user, it always amazes me how hard it is to navigate Java's downloads. Assuming non-techies know that "Java Runtime Environment" is what they need to run Java apps, you still have to dig past a JDK and NetBeans link to get to it. I tried walking a relative through downloading the JRE a week ago and it took way longer than it should have.

Good release, but real fun stuff in Java 7

[caseih]

Java 6 has made great strides in many areas, including speed, Swing LAF, etc. It now uses GTK theme engines (works with all themes) to allow swing apps to look more like GTK apps. The imitation is still very imperfect, but it's much improved over the old, crappy, Metal look. I believe generics have been improved some in 6, and I think, if I recall correctly, 6 marks the beginning of non-backwards compatible changes to the JVM itself to pave the way for a lot of exciting new features in Java 7, the most notable will the inclusion (finally) of delegates, making GUI event programming a lot cleaner. It's possible that with Java 7 finally on feature parity with .NET, someone could write a .NET to JVM translator, such as the reverse of ikvm, to allow C# code to be executed on a clean, GPLd Java stack. I still prefer C# to Java at this point, and it would be nice to have the difference between the two stacks (technologically anyway) be insignificant, hopefully helping developers who would choose .NET choose the now safer Java alternative. .NET really did get a jump on Java technologically up until now. It's better in several ways including the generics model, delegates, and being able to support a number of languages including python (jpython for JVM seems to be stalled). Java 7 will start to change all that. Sun's really proved they are listening to the community. Either that or .NET really got them scared.