The torrent has begun...

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Not the BitTorrent of some particular movie or game, but the torrent of changes to
the JDK that were held up pending a final blessing on the OpenJDK Mercurial transition.
How do I, a non-Sun employee know this? Because I'm subscribed to the build-dev mailing
list (which seems to be getting the Mercurial changeset notification emails), and
on Wednesday (March 26th), one such email contained 72 new changesets, ranging
from extensions to the query API for JMX 2.0:

6602310: Extensions to Query API for JMX 2.0

6604768: IN queries require their arguments to be constants

Summary: New JMX query language and support for dotted attributes in queries.

to bug fixes in javaw.exe for the Windows JRE:

6596475: (launcher) javaw should call InitCommonControls

Summary: javaw does not show error window after manifest changes.

to some changes to the Process class to better allow for IO redirection:

4960438: (process) Need IO redirection API for subprocesses

and more beyond that.

I have to say, I'm getting a little giddy watching all these things flow into the
JDK--it's been a while since I just sat and watched the build notification messages
on a large project like this, and it always gives me this weird sense of accomplishment,
even though it's not work that I'm doing or arguably even care about. But it should
stand as a clear sign to anybody who think Java-the-platform is "done"--the guys at
Sun certainly don't think so, and more importantly, are putting in the effort to improve
it.

Except now, we can see the work being done, which makes all the difference
in the world.

Some of you may remember that on several speaker panels I was on, I was a bit bullish
(on the surface of things) about the OpenJDK process. I think my exact comments were,
"I think for the majority of Java developers, this is a 'No Big Deal, Move Along,
Nothing to See Here' kind of step." I still believe that, in fact: I believe that
to the vast majority of Java developers, the fact that anybody can now see the sausage
being made yields no real advantage, and therefore is of no real interest.

But to the handful of Java developers who refuse to see the JVM or the Java libraries
(or even the Java compiler) as a black box, this is huge. We can now not only post
the bugs that we run across during development, and more importantly, subscribe to
the mailing lists, watch for the bug fix notification, apply the Mercurial changeset
that patches the bug, and if the patch doesn't work, notify Sun. But if the patch
does work, not only can we confirm the bug's elimination, but we can move beyond
it, even before the production release of the next Java build. It may not be
something you do on a regular basis, but when you're completely blocked waiting for
a bug fix from Sun...

... that's huge.

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