Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Monday November 03, 2008

OpenJDK 6 and 6u10 features

There have been a number of inquiries about when the various new features of 6u10 would be available in OpenJDK.

OpenJDK 6 build 12 contained ports of bug fixes from a number of 6u10 component areas (corba, jaxp, jaxws, langtools). Most changes from the core jdk component area of 6u10 were not ported. The porting effort that took place of a relatively small number of bugs to a subset of the full OpenJDK code base was still a sizeable effort. The full set of changes made to the core jdk in 6u10 is many times larger with a proportionally larger porting cost. We at Sun do not plan to do a wholesale port of those 6u10 features from the core jdk to OpenJDK 6. However, over the coming months we will be porting those 6u10 features to OpenJDK 7 and we would welcome community assistance in backporting appropriate features from OpenJDK 7 to OpenJDK 6. (These jdk area features in 6u10 are separate from plugin and webstart functionality.)