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.
