Javasoft Keeps Promise With JDK v1.1
This month saw the final release of Sun's Java Development Kit v1.1. We've been talking about it for weeks, and now the topic is only bound to heat up further.
Gear-heads that we are, we were very curious to see how the list of changes held up in the final release. The answer is, for better or worse, we got just about everything we were promised.
In fact, it appears that the development of 1.1 was brought very judiciously in and out of beta. This as opposed to some irresponsible public beta releases (increasing in frequency concurrently with Internet popularity)Êthat we've seen recently--the kind in which major features of the product change in mid-beta.
Although there's no law, we can state (historically)Êthat by the time a piece of software reaches the point where it's called beta, it's supposedly a mere single step away from shrink-wrap and store shelves. Of course, every software shop has to embellish upon procedure, and many are tempted into early releases of development code. This can be good or bad depending entirely on what the code is for, but calling it beta is usually misleading, even today.
To its credit, Javasoft called the first release of Java alpha, and apparently pulled off a well-planned beta release. Looking back at the documented changes, it appears that the company already defined the nature of all of the major enhancements. Broken tool programs supplied with the JDKÊwere fixed (most notably the early betas of the JARÊutility), minor bugs in various parts of the APIÊwere repaired, and a few trifles were added and taken away. By and large, however, the work done in beta appears to have been organizational. Object and method names were changed to be more intelligible. For instance, the bulk of the changes appear to have been related to internal look and feel--making this a very responsible and complete beta indeed.
As we said last week, Netscape has already announced its intended support for the new APIÊin the company's upcoming browser release. Although we haven't heard from Microsoft yet, we presume it will follow suit. Despite the fact that there's nothing concrete from either yet, the speedy final release undoubtedly heralds a timely integration into the mass-market Web browsers. Very encouraging performance gains will also be likely to spur the transition. Between macroscopic improvements like the JARÊfile, and microscopic ones like the interpreter loop rewrite, Sun's published numbers indicate (in some cases)Êa four fold speed increase over the previous version. Of course, one or two areas of Sun's test indicate a minor speed loss, but overall there's no question the efficiency of the system appears to be much improved.
Happily, the marvelous yet inconsistent Java Tutorial is in the process of being made current with 1.1; we must admit we rather cynically thought it might not be updated so that someone might make more money selling books, but we're happy to see that Sun hasn't become that shortsighted. There's also relatively nice documentation to aid in the version transition. The treatment of old Java in the new Java environment is pretty much what you'd expect: 1.0 Java works in the 1.1 Java Virtual Machine, and 1.1 Java does not work in the existing 1.0 JVM.
With the final release for Windows 95/NTÊand Solaris has also come "solid" claims for release dates of the Macintosh and Solaris x86 versions: "second quarter of 1997." Not bad, we suppose. There will also be a shoring up of the Solaris release, and it appears that where there was advance work that there was only time to do it on one platform--the Windows version.ÊJust to give an idea, a quick perusal indicated that part of the Java interface to native methods is not quite completed for Solaris. Additionally, while JavaBeans (version 1.0) has now been officially incorporated into the API, there is another latecomer arriving separately that will not be: JavaIDL (IDLÊstands for Interface Definition Language). This is a package designed to create compatibility between Java and CORBA, an up-and-coming "object networking system." More on this later.
If you haven't done so yet, it's time to get the new final version of the JDK and start exploring. Next week, we'll be looking at the new AWTÊin some detail.
