What’s special about the 6u10 that a minor release gets this much attention? After years of failures in the client space, this release is promising to reverse that trend. The message was clear; the release number maybe minor but the changes are major. To drive the point home, Danny’s first statement was that this release is about supporting rich client content much better than what we’ve come to expect. To this end, this update has had a major overhaul of its runtime environment. The JDK has been in beta for about a year and in that time it has been downloaded more than 1,000,000 times. Most notability, this version of the JDK will be the oldest to be accepted by Google’s new browser Chrome. In addition to the hundreds of bug fixes, the 6u10 is being touted to be lighter and more nibble full of features that create a more consumer friendly experience. Another concern was necessary support for JavaFX. One of the biggest changes comes with the new WebBrowser plugin, Unlike the old plugin, the new plugin runs outside of the browsers process space. The advantages of moving the JRE to run out of process are numerous. The biggest is increased stability. The coolest that you can now drag your applets out of the browser and have them continue to run even after the browser has been shutdown. Applet startup time is improved with the new plugin. The old plugin started the JRE in the browsers main event thread. WIth the JRE running out of process, the even thread is no longer tied up. The bad news is that the new plug-in is targeted to more modern browsers such as IE 7 and FireFox 3.0. One of the biggest headaches is how Java has been traditionally delivered to the end users. This has all changed with this version of the JRE. Updates from the browser will happen more automatically without much interactions with the end user. In addition, the JRE has been broken down into a kernel, core classes to Java Plug-In and Java Web Start, and other commonly needed client side APIs. All other bits of the JRE will be downloaded in a low priority background thread. The net effect is that a clean install of the JRE has been reduced to 4 megs. In addition future updates will be delivered via a patching mechanism that eliminates the need to download the entire JRE. Other performance enhancements include a mechanism that attempts to keep the disk cache hot with the JRE. This can result in a significant decrease in startup time. Graphics has also been greatly improved with the introduction of Nimbus, the eventual replacement to (still the default system) Ocean. In addition to giving widgets a more modern look, Nimbus signals a switch away from raster to vector graphics. This reliance will allow graphics to perfectly adapt to future higher resolution monitors. If with all this news you are feeling like an orphaned Mac user or Linux user, that feeling isn’t going to get better any time soon. While one from Sun or apparently from Apple, can speak for when the 6u10 may make to Mac land, recent history has demonstrated that we could be waiting for some time. The big sticking point with Linux is the need to integrate the XRender pipeline. Until 6u10 is released to OSS, that can’t happen. Even with these hickups, the future of the platform on client machines looks bright. My measure will be when I stop getting Java install questions from my mother. Until then, we can only hope that the realization is as good as the dream.

This is a long overdue modernization. The JVM has been delivered monolithically since the very beginning. Back when it was "just" 12 or 15 megs, that was painful but not intolerable. Like inflation during the '70s, I think that JVM size has increased faster than average bandwidth. It's time, and past time, to break up the monolith. No client JVM should ever download com.sun.corba.* or org.omg.*, for example.

including java.com. It should be the default instead of 6 v7. I know the link is there to the left, but really...

+1 JRE6_10 should be already the default in Java.com!!!. This release I think is one of the best releases in all Java times so should be the one and we have to encourage our users to upgrade fast to it.

I don't know. I installed it on an existing WinXP box and have LOTS of issues with it, e.g.: a) still prompts me for proxy user/password in Firefox (and does not remember it if I entered it) b) in IE, the Scenegraph demo applets do not load at all for me...no errors either, so no idea why. Very disapointed by the fact it is not 100% foolproof...unlike Flash which for me works everywhere, on every box. Sorry.

Very disapointed by the fact it is not 100% foolproof

In user interface department, maybe, in back end development it is working perfectly, at least to me.

Uhm...but it's whole focus is supposed to be on the user interface part...I am sure the server is stable.

are you sure you installed it? sorry for the stupid question, I've tracked this puppy through each release and haven't had a single issue with the install. Flash had its own problems as well if you ever tried the latest 10 release.

I run the full install. Success. I know it's updated because the proxy dialog displays the fonts properly (i.e. using the Windows font rasterizer instead of the old java2D one).

very odd, are you using ff3? sorry to ask, I'm behind a proxy, and haven't run into those issues including the scenegraph demos. I would definitely spend the couple of minutes to file a bug.

.unlike Flash which for me works everywhere, on every box.

Not for me. The pc i am using right now, I have to view some pages IE to see the Flash content. There have been other issues too.

Flash works everywhere? That's news to me. I assume you're not spending much time in Linux then. I'm running 32-bit Linux because so many sites I enjoy depend on Flash, which is VERY difficult to get working on 64-bit Linux. Also, I actually found myself having to install flashblock on Firefox because the flash plugin is so buggy. To my knowledge, my browser never crashes due to Java applets or JavaFX...certainly not for unwelcome advertising (yet). Browser crashing due to Flash-heavy advertising-laden pages seems to happen weekly before I installed the blocker. Also, Flash applets often seem to kill my CPU and perform very poorly. I have no idea if that's due to the Flash authors or the plugin, but the bottom line is that I resent Flash and wished less sites used it. The more important point, however, is that Flash needs competition. I think JavaFX, in a few iterations, could be a first-class competitor to Flash either killing it or persuading Adobe to take platforms outside of Macintosh or Windows more seriously as well as improve it's core features and performance. I welcome the competition and am actually excited about the potential for Sun to do a better job with desktop Java this time around. I'd like to see Java become a major player in the desktop space in the future and in order to so they'll need to work on performance as they're starting to address with this release.

thank goodness ;-) btw, somewhere I ran into the pulp core api http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/. The samples look absolutely amazing. With update 10, once the applets are downloaded, the experience is absolutely fantastic. In fact, I don't think a user would be able to tell that these were written in Java vs Flash (if they cared that is). Now we just need the tooling and more community involvement. I'd much rather stay in Java on the front and back instead of having to flip and switch context to AS3, JavaScript, or C#. Jin

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Did they add support for heavyweight components in Swing components (specifically JInternalFrame) yet? I understand it's slated for 1.7 but It would be cool to see that earlier.

... but I don't know how to post a news in TSS. The news I want to mention is: Seam 2.1.0.GA is released on Oct 21 08, but I didn't see any news about it on TSS at least until Oct 22 2.16pm EST. Seam is more useful than "another web framework", isn't it? So sad that there's no news .... PS: I'm not a Seam fan. I used Spring before and EJB3 in the current project and learn Seam in the free time. Sorry again for hijacking this thread.

... but I don't know how to post a news in TSS. The news I want to mention is: Seam 2.1.0.GA is released on Oct 21 08, but I didn't see any news about it on TSS at least until Oct 22 2.16pm EST.

Seam is more useful than "another web framework", isn't it? So sad that there's no news ....

PS: I'm not a Seam fan. I used Spring before and EJB3 in the current project and learn Seam in the free time.

Sorry again for hijacking this thread.

http://www.theserverside.com/news/post.tss

JAVA FX is one of the major future release item. I am still waiting to see how easy will the web development will become with it. Will it reuse existing web framework concepts. Adobe flex tags and scripting is very similar to JSF and other web development frameworks. I am not sure will JSF and other things will be reused in this new dragable Applets?? Creating a complex enterprise application with JavaFX alone and not reusing JSF/Spring Web Flow/SEAM etc, will it make sense? I still need to understand how this all will integrate.

JAVA FX is one of the major future release item.

I am still waiting to see how easy will the web development will become with it.

A good visual editor to make JavaFX applets should be developed. I hope that Sun will improve the current NetBeans visual editor for JavaFX. Instead, the eclipse based visual editor for Adobe Flex is very good. The major advantage to use an Adobe Flex applet instead of a Java Applet (previous 6u10) was the performance and the amount of kb to download. I don't know if JavaFX will fill the performance gap. The promise with Jdk6u10 (and next Jdk7) to minimize the kb download should be accomplished.

...
Creating a complex enterprise application with JavaFX alone and not reusing JSF/Spring Web Flow/SEAM etc, will it make sense? I still need to understand how this all will integrate.

I think the new JavaFX will be used instead of the good-old Java Applets, and will not replace the good-old HTML-AJAX-JSF sites (SpringMVC, Jboss Seam,). Thus, in the next future, we'll have the choice to make: - a light-weight web site with JSF (Seam,...); - a RIA web site with JavaFX Applets or with Adobe flex.

[QUOTE]The big sticking point with Linux is the need to integrate the XRender pipeline. Until 6u10 is released to OSS, that can’t happen.[/QUOTE] Java 6 is, among other things, a transition from a restrictive license (CDDL) to an open license (GPLv2) - see http://openjdk.java.net/. In other words, Java 6 IS ALREADY available and licensed under the GPL - for the most part. So this is probably not the sticking point in making said code available on GNU/Linux. The sticking point most probably is licensing issues with parts of the remaining code that are still not available under the GPL.

I was expecting JavaFX to be part of update 10. I have installed update 10 and I can't see it there. The release notes have a comment about being automatically downloaded, but I can find no information on how this will be done. Does anyone know when JavaFX will be part of the standard Java install?