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JDK 1.5 Beta 2 Tidbits

Just downloaded beta 2 of Java 1.5. And there are plenty small things that's noticeable (by browsing the documentation, I haven't tried any of these in code yet):

  • On Windows, it installs itself into "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0" and "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0". It's no longer j2sdk. I never liked that name.
  • The System.getenv(String) method is no longer deprecated.
  • JFrame.add() works again. It took them seven years to do it!
  • The new javac -Xlint option produce warnings for legal but potentially problematic constructs.
  • There's a new tool called apt. Guess what it does. (Not getting new packages for your Debian distribution of GNU/Linux!)
  • IndexedPropertyChangeEvent is finally added to the JavaBeans API.
  • The java.lang package grew quite a bit. New members include Appendable, Iterable, Readable, Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler interfaces and Enum, ProcessBuilder, StringBuilder classes.

Now, is it too much to ask for a JFrame that shows up where Windows (or GNOME or KDE or CDE or Motif or whatever) would have it show up instead of the top-left corner?

Responses[4] RSS feed for responses to this blog entry
Posted by Weiqi Gao on May 29, 2004 6:52:48 PM CDT #


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Re: JDK 1.5 Beta 2 Tidbits

Comment from Danno Ferrin on June 1, 2004 11:20:44 AM CDT #
There is an api to have the platform determine where the wnidow is set. You mentioned a lot of other thigs I am supprosed you missed it. It's In the release notes (see the second item) and the JavaDoc has it too.
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Re: JDK 1.5 Beta 2 Tidbits

Comment from Weiqi Gao on June 1, 2004 12:20:52 PM CDT #

I missed that one. Thanks for pointing it out.

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Re: JDK 1.5 Beta 2 Tidbits

Comment from Fernando Cassia on June 2, 2004 2:10:27 AM CDT #
You say "I never liked that name" refering to "j2sdk" and "j2re". Well, I guess the MARKETING folks at sun made a great decision back in the Java 1.2 days (before the release) to call it "Java 2" from a marketing perspective. This was important then, and continues to be important now, because: "Java" (without the "2") is associated with Java 1.0, 1.1.x, and its problems (slow, buggy, different implementations, Microsoft's pollution of Java, the MSFT Java VM, the Netscape Java1 VM included with the ancient Communicator 4.x browsers, etc). Java2 means, in a sense "java new", "a new kind of java". Sadly, everyone else (including those developers who are paid to write java code) kept refering in newsgroups to the generic "java". So "Java 2" was confined to the cover of a few Sun-sponsored books, and nothing more. But every time I want to mention SUN'S JAVA, I call the technology "Java 2" (meaning: "Sun's Java, not anybody else, and of version 1.2 or higher"). Perhaps the solution would be to release "Java3" and up the version number then from 1.5 to 2.0, to make things more confusing? (I'm being ironic ;-). Regards Fernando
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Re: JDK 1.5 Beta 2 Tidbits

Comment from Weiqi Gao on June 2, 2004 7:03:04 AM CDT #

Sun marketing painted themselves into a corner with the promotion of the trade market name "J2EE", and to a lesser extent, "J2ME" and "J2SE".

It is almost impossible to introduce "Java 3" now. Try saying "J3EE" ten times.

If past experience is any indication, when the JDK 1.7 is released in 2008, they'll decide to call it Java 7.

By then we'll all be using MDA tools that works with both Java and .NET. Who want's to develop for a single platform when they can develop for all platforms? ;-)


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