Java SE Customers

Simon Godden, Technical Architect at Perceptive Informatics Inc. "With the release of Java SE 6, one interesting development is a major improvement in the loading time of applets. I don't know what exactly has changed, but there is no more waiting for up to 30 seconds as that horrible animated graphic spins around - applets appear almost instantly."

 

Evan Summers, Developer, "I transitioned from Java SE 5.0 to Java SE 6 seamlessly a month or so ago without any snags, and more recently from Netbeans 5.0 to Netbeans5.5 (on Java SE 6), which was equally a total breeze. The WebStart client is really neat, and of course the JDK contains cool new goodies to play with. I've already had some fun with GroupLayout and SystemTray on the desktop side, and I'm looking forward to playing with JavaDB and JDBC4 in the near future. The Java Platform is going from strength to strength with Java SE 6, in all respects, and its quality shines. Thanks to everyone at Sun and in the community who has contributed Java SE 6, the latest and greatest brew."

 

Graeme Wallace, CTO, FareCompare , "When the early builds of Java SE 6 came out, we jumped in to see if we could get any performance improvements, which are crucial to our business. To make a long story short, the difference between Java SE 5 and Java SE 6 was startling. In terms of crunching through air fares, we are talking an increase in speed of 25% to 30%."

 

Steven G. Harris, vice president, Java Platform Group, Oracle , says: "Oracle has supported and contributed to the Java community for more than a decade, and Java SE 6 is a great step forward. Users of Oracle's industry leading IDE, Oracle JDeveloper, will enjoy Java SE 6's improved debugging and profiling capabilities while Oracle Application Server customers can look forward to the new diagnosability and Web services features enabled by Java SE 6."

 

Chee Cheng, Senior Systems Analyst, Chicago Tribune , notes: "I'm really pleased with the backwards compatibility I've seen with this release of the platform, and how well the NetBeans IDE 5.5 supports the release. Several years ago, I wrote some financial applets for the 1.4 version of the platform.I was curious about how they would do on this latest release so I decided to give Java SE 6 a try. I downloaded and ran my applets and I was pleased to find that everything worked perfectly. What really surprised me, though, was that my applets actually improved by running on this latest release. Floating point calculations in my applet are now running with greater accuracy, in addition to seeing overall improved performance of the applets when running on Java SE 6."

 

Dave Pickering, VP Engineering at Glassbox , says: "Glassbox is an open source Troubleshooter for Java applications that automatically diagnoses common problems for you. Behind a web interface, Glassbos uses JMX and aspect-oriented programming to discover applications, track performance and automatically diagnose problems so there is no need to change or rebuild your code. Our project necessitates that we rely heavily on Sun SE 6, and we push our JVMs aggressively with AOP and system level hooks. We have been very happy with the quality of JDK6, Sun has upped the ante again with increased stability, improved JMX, and better administrative tools to keep applications live in production. The Glassbox project exists to provide intuitive troubleshooting to the community, Java SE 6 is a leap forward for our project and for our customer base."

 

Dr. Barry Burd, author of Java for Dummies , has this to say: "As an author and educator, I'm thrilled about the inclusion Java DB of in JDK6. In my years of writing and teaching, I've always had to tiptoe around the quirks of various databases. While trying to describe underlying database principles, I would become tangled in descriptions of platform-specific alternatives. Even the simplest examples involved distracting, unnecessary tweaks.

But Java DB makes my job easy. Java DB is a canonical cross-platform database for Java applications. With Java DB, I can bypass database idiosyncrasies and emphasize the issues that matter to my readers. I can move quickly beyond the nitty-gritty, and focus on critical programming and design topics. Java DB provides an optimal level of encapsulation for my readers and my students."

 

Michel Ruffin, Software Coordination Director, Chief Technology Office - Alcatel-Lucent , reports: "At Alcatel-Lucent, we believe there are real benefits to free and open source software (FOSS). We're pleased with Sun's move to open source Java SE, and expect we and other Java developers will achieve real benefits from the move. The choice for a standard license, like the GPL plus Classpath Exception, is a real step forward as it will easier the management of license's terms and conditions by reducing the number of open source licenses. We believe that FOSS is more likely to be durable, have higher quality, and faster vendor or community response to defects. In addition, by further reducing vendor lock-in and encouraging ISV integration, all help us reduce our time to market, and better manage our long term support costs."

 

Matt Quail, Head Developer FishEye & Crucible, Cenqua , "There is always excitement in the Java developer community when a new JDK is released. New capabilities, new language features, improved performance and tools; we are always itching to get the chance to put them to use. Java SE 6 is certainly no exception. One of the things I like the most about this release are the steps that have been taken to allow Java applications to deeply integrate into the environment they are running in. Swing apps can integrate into the icon tray and launch helper applications, command-line apps now get java.io.Console; you can query disk space or properly set read/write permissions. I mean, you can even query the MTU and MAC address on network interfaces now!

Something that is really useful for us with our FishEye product is the improved monitoring tools. Supporting customers at remote sites often involves a long game of email ping-pong, as they incrementally collect debugging or performance data. With the new instrumentation and monitoring interfaces this information can often be collected in one round-trip.

There is one final thing with this Java SE 6 release that has totally impressed me: that is the level of openness. The early and regular development drops, the responsiveness to bug fixes, the JCP process; it all contributes to a high level of trust in this release of Java. "

 

Jim Adams, Principal Java Architect, SAS , "I have been using JDK 6 for my development work since sometime around build 42. I have never found that it got in the way of the work that I was doing. In fact I was always impressed with the speed and memory footprint that it afforded me."

 

Incors developer Jan Boesenberg says: "As a Swing developer who has been working with the prerelease versions extensively I can say JDK 6 is a great leap forward. The Windows Look&Feel has become very nice, the rendering performance has improved again, and the subpixel rendering of fonts instantly makes Swing applications look much more professional. Additionally there are less known new feature that make our work much more productive. For example the Actions interface now supports toggles, which is very useful for check boxes, radio buttons, and toggle buttons. And of course there are hundreds of smaller bugfixes and improvements that make JDK 6 the most polished and stable JDK ever."

 

Walter van der Heiden, Software Engineer, HintTech , "In 2003 I joined HintTech in the Netherlands. After I attended Sun's Java 1.4 Programmer's training, I started the prepare for Sun's Certified Java Programmer's exam by writing a program for myself. This Swing program reads stock-market data from a (Java) broker API, displays the prices in a table, and draw's a chart of the prices, which can include trend-lines for technical analysis. After I passed the SCJP exam, J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) became available for developers and I switched to the pre-release of J2SE 5.0. I was (and still am, more on this later) suprised by quality and completeness of the beta JDK 5.0. For me, the beta JDK was production quality, it compiled perfect and encountered no problems running the application. The API was surprisingly complete.

Since my stock-market application collects the commodity-prices from the world-markets, the application runs for about 20 hours a day, 5 days a week, without problems; no memory leaks, no null pointer exceptions or other run-time exceptions.

My goal was to train myself in using the new language features of J2SE 5.0 and incorporate new API methods where applicable. So I changed all the datastructures to use Generics; e.g.,

List<ContractDetails> contractDetails = new ArrayList<ContractDetails>(); or Set<Exchange> exchanges = new TreeSet<Exchange>(); , which in my opinion better reflects the purpose. Cleaned-up almost every for-loop by using the enhanced for-loop; e.g.

for (FutureContract contract : contract) {
           if (contract.getExchange().isOpen() ...
}

instead of using a helper variable to keep track of the index. Looks nicer, is cleaner and less code means less chances of introducing bugs. Microsoft has a similair solution in C# 2.0 but is using two keywords, namely:

for (int i=0; i < 10; i++) { ... } and foreach (String s in myCollection) { ... }.

Applied variable arguments in methods, used the autoboxing and unboxing conversion if primitives to their corresponding object and vice versa. Got Ocean for free, an improved Metal look and feel (see screenshots of my WalTrader application, using the Substance look-and-feel).

When I saw that JDK 6 became available I didn't think twice to remove the JDK 5.0 and replace it with a pre-release of JDK 6. Since then I check weekly for new builds of JDK 6. And again I am still suprised by the completeness and quality of the pre-release of JAVA SE 6. Eclipse is my favourite IDE and I always use the latest and newest stable build in combination with the latest build of JDK 6 -- all I can say is: it works! For WalTrader I use most of the Swing-related new API features of JDK 6. Replaced SpringLayout (introduced in version 1.4) with the GroupLayout manager, which I just hand-code (I am not using Matisse, because I like to write the code for it). I have put the GroupLayout example code from the JDK API documentation in a helper method, so I have a convenient way to layout the field, e.g.,

GroupLayout layout = groupLayout(panel, JComponent[] { /* labels */ }, JComponent[] { /* fields, e.g., JTextField or JComboBox */ });.

Programmed the persistency of configuration files using the new javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader() interface and the XMLInputFactory() class instead of using the java.util.Properties() class.

I think it is a very good step of Sun to make pre-releases of new versions of the JDK available to developers. Developers can gain experience with this new version and when the client is ready to use a new JDK version, the developer has already some experiences with it. And I can't wait for JDK 7 and use the new features of Java SE 7. Personally I would like to see translucent JFrame's so that you can see some of the desktop underneath the application (save mouse movements). A complete platform-independent look and feel using Synth that shows the best-practices to create a 'skin'. Would like to see new language features that adds more object-orientation to Java technology and makes it more powerful."

 

Damon Hart-Davis, Engineer , "I've been very impressed with (a) the compatibility with 1.5 and (b) its robustness and cross-platform nature. WORA (without crashing!) really works for me. And when I've had problems your JVM folks have been personally responsive and attentive and helpful. My pro-bono web site runs on a network of 7... mirrors distributed throughout the world, running on a selection of hardware and OS flavours from 1GHz single-CPU Pentiums on Fedora Core 4 to Solaris 10 on my shiny new T1000 (which is also fantastic, BTW)! I develop on my Windows XP laptop. WORA really, really does work, and JDK6 helps deliver on that promise. I'm really looking forward to upgrading to the new concurrency and i18n features to better support my users."

 

Sam Berlin, Senior Engineer at Lime Wire LLC , helps manage development of one of the most popular P2P file sharing programs on the planet. The product continues to push the envelope on speed and innovation, utilizing advanced non-blocking I/O techniques, a reliable UDP layer, complex Swing components, and by offering its code to the world, like JDK 6's community process. When asked about his experience with JDK6, Sam said, "I've really been pleased with the startup times, text display improvements, and improved native platform look and feel I've seen as simply running our application on the latest JDK6 builds. That, coupled with the fast response I received from Sun's engineering teams when the community alerted us of compile problems, lead me to believe Sun is really taking the quality of this release seriously."

 

JIDE Software : "JIDE Software develops and sells professional Swing components and solutions that help you to deliver great-looking Desktop Java applications quicker, easier and smoother. We've been testing with the JDK6 builds for some time, and we're really excited about the improvements the Swing team has made. We're already seeing performance, look and feel, and developer productivity gains just by running on JDK6 builds. We are looking forward to the release of Java SE 6."