JDK 1.5.0_21 released

[Roedy Green]

Even though it is no longer officially supported, JDK/JRE 1.5.0_21 was
just released.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!"
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 48), evangelist for extreme programming.

 

[Lew]

Even though it is no longer officially supported, JDK/JRE 1.5.0_21 was
just released.

But it is still officially supported.

 

[Roedy Green]

Even though it is no longer officially supported, JDK/JRE 1.5.0_21 was
just released.

Oops.
JDK version 1.4 reached its end of life on 2008-10-30, and Sun will no
longer support it. JDK version 1.5 is slated for end of life
2009-10-30. End of life does not mean all copies of JDK version 1.5
will suddenly turn into pumpkins. Apple will still offer its JVM to
download. Sun will still offer it in the archives. It is just that Sun
will no longer fix any bugs in it. To get the bug fixes, you must go
to version 1.6.


--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!"
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 48), evangelist for extreme programming.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Even though it is no longer officially supported, JDK/JRE 1.5.0_21 was
just released.

Enterprise customers (as in buying Sun support) will demand 1.5
maintenance for a while. 1.6 requires source code changes, retuning,
and rediscovery of what bugs will be showing up. Where I work, it
wasn't until last year that public builds of 1.5 were free of
catastrophic bugs with no workarounds. A 1.6 update will have to wait
until business is slow.

 

[Lew]

Enterprise customers (as in buying Sun support) will demand 1.5
maintenance for a while. 1.6 requires source code changes, retuning,

What code changes?

and rediscovery of what bugs will be showing up. Where I work, it
wasn't until last year that public builds of 1.5 were free of
catastrophic bugs with no workarounds. A 1.6 update will have to wait
until business is slow.

Google "technical debt". Hopefully your business is too successful ever to be
slow.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Enterprise customers (as in buying Sun support) will demand 1.5
maintenance for a while. 1.6 requires source code changes, retuning,

What code changes?[/QUOTE]

Primarily, JDBC delegates are not compatible. 1.6 defines new JDBC
methods with return types that don't exist in Java 1.5. Proxies still
work but they're not always appropriate.

Google "technical debt". Hopefully your business is too successful ever to
be
slow.

When I say that JVMs have "catastrophic bugs", I really mean
catastrophic. We needed custom builds of 1.5 to avoid a file descriptor
bug that routed data streams completely randomly if Solaris NFS was in
use. Files, JDBC connections, HTTP connections - all mixing together.
And then there have been numerous GC bugs where a collector stops the
JVM for 2 minutes... 5 minutes... 10000 minutes. Even today, Java 1.5
needs lots of -XX options to fix CMS self-tuning bugs.

There is no technical debt when no Java 1.6 features are needed yet.
The update will happen when it's safe for business.

 

[Mike Amling]

When I say that JVMs have "catastrophic bugs", I really mean
catastrophic. We needed custom builds of 1.5 to avoid a file descriptor
bug that routed data streams completely randomly if Solaris NFS was in
use. Files, JDBC connections, HTTP connections - all mixing together.
And then there have been numerous GC bugs where a collector stops the
JVM for 2 minutes... 5 minutes... 10000 minutes. Even today, Java 1.5
needs lots of -XX options to fix CMS self-tuning bugs.

Yep. While we don't measure these things ourselves, our releases have
to be able to run on 1.4 because of customer sentiment that 1.4.2 was
the last "stable" release. We only ship code that uses post-1.4 Java
features if it's done via reflection.

--Mike Amling