IDN Pick 6: A Quick Tour of Tiger's Stripes

Since Sun released J2SE Tiger, the biggest Java upgrade since the mid-1990s dozens of pubs, analysts, vendors and fellow Java devs have weighed in. Integration Developer News' Pick 6 gives readers the "best of the best'" of user assessments, expert Q&As, predictions and drill-down training, including a no-nonsense J2SE book and webinar. Get the best from Sun, Wily, HP, and Java experts Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan from LinuxWorld, CNET, eWeek, Computerworld, Javalobby.org and java.sun.com

by Vance McCarthy

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  • LinuxWorld offers an excellent Q&A with J2SE 5.0 (JSR 176) spec lead Calvin Austin. .In the interview, Austin lays out the key elements of Tiger's "4 pillars," which are: (1) ease of development; (2) monitoring and manageability; (3) performance and scalability; and (4) desktop client support. He also notes how the "community process" was so important to Tiger's final look. Read the interview

  • Apps management with Tiger gets tons easier, thanks to bytecode instrumentation (BCI). Look under the covers at the BCI implementation of JSR 174/163, based in large part on management-enabling technologies from Wily Technologies. Also, leading management vendor Hewlett-Packard provides devs with a free and in-depth "how to" webinar for BCI on Oct. 21, which demos how to use BCI to instrument Java methods at load time or during program execution. The code demos will also cover the JVMTI native code interface and the java.lang.instrument interface for adding instrumentation to your J2SE 5.0 applications. Code samples included. Attend the J2SE BCI free webinar

  • Java.sun.com offers an in-depth interview with Graham Hamilton, lead Tiger architect and Sun Fellow. Hamilton discusses in depth Tiger's updates "across the entire core Java platform," including changes to the Java language, the virtual machine and even GUI improvements. Read the interview.

  • With Tiger sporting more than 100 substantial changes, bestselling Java authors Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan offer Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook.
    The book uses a task-oriented format to give devs a jump-start to the best, most useful and coolest Tiger technologies. Read a review of the book.

  • And, for a non-Sun perspective on Tiger, eWeek talks with members of the Java community about Tiger's prospects, with some interesting results. Matt Schmidt, director of technology at Javalobby.org told eWeek he thinks it will take "at least a year" before Tiger gets wide adoption, at least in larger companies. Read the article.

  • Beyond server-centric Tiger, two more futuristic elements:
      Tiger's desktop prospects are probed by CNET, which takes a look at just where analysts say Tiger's desktop promise measures up (or doesn't) to Microsoft's. For its part, The Inquirer looks at other key Java desktop developments, including JDIC (Java Desktop Integration Components), a project which provides a set of APIs and allows any cross-platform Java application to use native features found on many desktops (such as browsers, email, etc.) Read the Inquirer story
        Then, there's the countdown to the next upgrade, Mustang. Sun suggests that several topics are up for discussion on the next J2SE version, slated for 2006. Included are: XML, Web services, the Java desktop, and large systems performance. ComputerWorld offers a brief glimpse. Read the CW story.





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