Java 1.4.2 Released

peterwilm writes "Sun released Java 1.4.2 today. It includes many enhancements and changes among them the native look&feel for Win XP and GTK 2.0 as well as support for Itanium 2."

Comments

startup time improvements

[brlewis]

From my POV, this looks like the most significant change:

Optimizations have been made to the core libraries to reduce startup time. For a small command line application, startup time has been reduced by roughly thirty percent; for a small Swing application, by fifteen to twenty percent.

Re:startup time improvements

[melete]

Yeah, that's a HUGE improvement. But playing with the beta, the biggest speed enhancement seems to be in the networking code -- it's a lot cleaner, faster, and not nearly as buggy as 1.4.1

Re:How fast is java?

[LoneRanger]

Read the Swing release notes dude. They support GTK theming as long as it uses a certain GTK engine. They are attempting to support all GTK engines, but evidently it's not easy.

from the "ya don't say" department

[scrytch]

I found this "issue" a little mysterious:

The Java HotSpot VM cannot expand its heap size if memory is completely allocated and no swap space is available.

Re:How fast is java?

[j3110]

You know, I'm usually the first man upset when people say "Java is slow" without evidence, but I think performance improvement is a valid question of any new product. It's even more of a question when the new release actually is about performance to a degree. So... I wonder who modded you flaimbait, and why.

On topic though, I've noticed a lot of performance enhancements. If you don't load a GUI, you're program will start pretty much instantly, and will only take about 5M of RAM for a small program. GUI's will take 6M more just because. I'm sure a lot of the 6M is external to the VM and/or frame buffers.

In any case, I'm happy that my programs keep getting faster without me having to touch them. Also, now they work on the Itanium2, I can put that in the marketing material. (All with no coding/work on my part.) Sometimes, you have to really appreciate the good sides of Java.

Well

[ENOENT]

I expect my Java VM to start killing off other processes at random until it DOES work!!!

Re:Yesterday

[Adhoc]

There is a lot of documentation built into eclipse. Look under Help -> Help Contents. There are developer guides and API references for most of elcipse/swt. Also, check Eclipse Articles on the eclipse website for some more tutorials and guides.

XP Look 'n Feel?

[digerata]

Alright, I am a avid proponent of java. But come on guys, XP has been out for almost two year and they are just *now* releasing support for that look and feel?

That's just one more reason why people are flocking to SWT over Swing.

Re:Is anyone else having problems to connect?

[jmertic]

Same here. After it gets your personal info, it trys to redirect to a server that isn't there. In IE, it leaves that URL in the address bar. Remove the port info and you can keep going.

Re:What version is that?

[calennert]

J2SE, v.1.4.2 = Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, version 1.4.2

Re:Puzzling Download Size

[Anonymous Coward]

1.4.0 and 1.4.1 had their JREs split up into US English only and International versions. The sizes you give for the older versions are the US English only and thus smaller version.

With 1.4.2 they seem to only offer the international version now, hence the increase.