State of the OpenJDK Project and Java 7

LarsWestergren writes "David Flanagan, the author of Java in a Nutshell, has a nice writeup on the state of the open source development of the next version of Java. The article explains the difference between the JDK7 and the OpenJDK projects and how to join them. Furthermore, it has an overview of the release schedule, proposed language changes and projects of interest. A more technical and in-depth tracking of the language changes and proposed new features can be found at Alex Miller's blog. This is the first in a series, and 'each future installment will provide an update on what's currently happening in the latest builds from the project, along with a deep dive into a new feature or API that's tracking for inclusion in Java 7.'"

Comments

Re:Swing Sucks

[samkass]

In the latest JDK6 and JDK7 builds, Swing has been replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance and looks halfway decent-- it's called "Swing" and has the same API as Swing. Seriously, there have been vast improvements in Swing lately, from using hardware acceleration to themes that very closely match native L&F's. I'm not sure what year you last tried Swing, but give it another look.

In the latest JDK7 build, they even fixed the "mixing heavyweight and lightweight" z-order problem, so you can mix native AWT widgets into a lightweight Swing UI.

Re:Swing Sucks

[LarsWestergren]

The one problem for java applications is still startup time. I just don't know what can be done about that except preloading java at boot. Which is a waste if you are not running a java app that day.

Actually, Chet Haase recently blogged about the changes being done in this area. Unfortunately many of these quickstart "cheats" are for Windows only, when questioned about this at JavaOne they said they didn't have enough engineering hours to do this for other operating systems but would welcome community contributions to this with open arms.

Linux and other users WILL still benefit from the Java Kernel work by Ethan Nichola's team though, this will be backported to Java 6 as part of the Consumer JRE project.