The Tiger is out!

The beta release of the next version of Java 2 Standard Edition is finally out. You can find it here. It's officially known as JDK 1.5, but internally it's referred to as Tiger. There are stacks and stacks of new features. It's hard to know where to begin talking about all of the exciting stuff in it. For me, the big one is Generics: the ability to parameterize a type. This is vaguely like templates in C++, but much cleaner and more straightforward. It dramatically improves working with things like container classes, and it has a lovely backwards compatibility story. Go grab a copy. Take it out for a spin. Let us know what you think.
February 4, 2004