mustang

Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2006-06-24 11:43:22

so i was looking at the new stuff in mustang (java 6.0), which is currently in beta 2 and is supposedly going to be released this fall. a lot of it seems geared towards web services stuff, which is kind of cool, i guess. it makes it really easy to distribute applications geographically, since you can turn blocks of code into web services pretty much trivially, and then have other blocks of code running on different machines use those services. nifty.

the other thing that i think is cool is that javaDB (based on apache derby, based on ibm's cloudscape) is going to come as part of the SDK, so you have access to a lightweight database without having to set up mysql or some other database. what's really stupid is that apparently it's not included in the JRE, so it's gonna make deployment of javaDB-dependent apps more messy. bah.

the only other thing on the top-10 new features list that i care about is the scripting framework. from what i understand, this allows you to write code in some scripting language (python, ruby, etc.) and mix it in with the java code. i'm not fully clear on the details of this, but from what i gather, it's basically targeted at J2EE webapps, so you can mix your servlets with PHP (or other) code. it could be useful if done properly, but i'm concerned that they're trying to do too much with this. ah well.

other stuff in mustang is all the expected stuff: improved UI with better swing widgets and OS integration, better compiler and debug support (surprisingly, even java 5 comes with a whole set of monitoring tools that i had no idea about), and better security.

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