The Tiger is out!

After a mammoth amount of testing, J2SE 5.0 has finally hit FCS. The team that put it together, and the community they work in, have done a fabulous job. I'm particularly happy that the longest running feature request has finally shipped: Generics. This has been high on my wish list since before the first release of Java. The global technical debate that raged on-and-on finally settled down and a fine piece of work has resulted. Thanks to Gilad Bracha for being the lead cat-herder on JSR14.

There is, of course, a lot more to 5.0 than Generics. The language feature list is long, as is the feature summary. This has been a major undertaking, and truly represents a large advance for Java developers everywhere.

Today there is also a new release of the NetBeans IDE, with full support for all the cool new stuff in Tiger -- and a whole lot more. It's fast. It's easy to use. Take it out for a spin.

September 30, 2004