Madhura's Blog

Got a note from a friend from India asking why haven't you been in touch. She asks, is it because you have been busy shipping jdk6 beta? Dang! My first blog was during jdk6 beta, I blinked my eye and so much has happened.

Alright what all have we missed? Let me start with the disclaimer: I will end up jumping around topics while spilling the events and my thoughts around them in an unorganized-but-hopefully-coherent fashion. . So fasten your seat belts and bear with me...
To recap: we have shipped a fabulous desktop-feature-rich JDK6. Right now, we are on track to deliver jdk6 update2. [You are going to love the new and improved JRE install experience!] While working on these commercial JDK releases, we also worked on getting a fully buildable open source JDK out in time for Javaone 2007. Yes among other things like openJDK testing, we also got the quality portal created in time for Javaone. Go take a peak and be part of the team.

Am I forgiven now for not getting to my blog scratchpad for the past year? By the way, have a confession to make regarding the last blog---I talked about beta needing a full qualification and how it was justified for it to lag behind the latest snashot for the sake of the corporate customers. Guess what? The world has changed! After all that effort spent on qualifying the beta, we realised there are more flying tomatoes in the world and so very few elephants... [Elephants? Our VP Rich Green tells us about these elephants - The ITs of the corporate world, which need this near-perfect release before they start thinking of trying or deploying it] And then there are the mere mortals a.k.b.m.a [as known by me as] flying tomatoes who are not afraid of and on the contrary want the latest and the greatest for a spin. The most feedback we got was by these FTs on the latest snapshots. Not on the three month old beta. What can I say other than makes sense and that the learning continues. We listened to these hints and are planning to go towards the short and sweet betas. To give you the latest bits as fast as possible so we get the valuable and most relevant feedback.

In an unrelated incident i started rock-climbing and I quite enjoy it. I can climb 5.9s and sometimes can bag an easy 5.10 Yooohooo! :) It's climbed on the charts as my 4th favorite activity. Dancing, snowboarding , scuba diving being the first three. While on the diversion i must confess, due to all that has been happening at work, haven't really gotten time to go rock climbing much, sorry Ken, i promise i'll join the tuesday rock-climbin ritual next month, come-rain-or-shine.

Back to the 8-5 (yeah, right! Who am I kidding.) world. Aren't you excited about the open possibilities.....Don't know about others, but all of us in JDK quality team surely are. We are as excited about opening Java as all of you are. Cheers to the free spirit that is in the air! Thoroughly excited to expand the JDK team to be the whole Java community. Day one at Javaone was quite exciting....and am looking forward to the rest of the days to cross path with the non-sun-not-outsiders-anymore Java aficionados... more from me later...

Java SE 6, codename Mustang, Beta was released. Who am I and why am I talking about Mustang, you ask? Well, I work for the Java SE Quality organization. And my role, in short, is to be the quality watchdog, the voice of the customer (you) for Mustang. All of us in Mustang team are working really hard to make it the best release ever. Of all the things about working on Mustang, the most fun is, we are carving it right in front of you folks. Asking you to comment, to point us to BIG No-Nos, to give us a hand with smoothing some of Mustang's edges. Some of us call it transperncy, becoming open, engaging with the community, or if you would like, having our dirty laundry out in the open. Don't know about you, but we are enjoying every bit of the conversation, interaction with you.

Enough of my rambling, let me get to the question in the title. If you don't already know, Mustang beta is based on B59 while the latest available snapshot is B71. Hmmm... Why would we do that? And why would anyone want to get the Beta when 3 month newer bits are available? Well, strange as it may sound to the daredevils, the flying tomatoes of software, not everybody wants to experiment with the latest and the greatest and potentially unstable bits. (Fortunately we haven't heard any of them having major problems so far.) So snapshots do not go through any system testing before we post them. And Betas are meant for a different audience. It's for those who are looking for stable feature complete bits. The enterprise, the corporate kinds. So, in order for Mustang beta bits to reach a stable stage, B59 is when we closed the gates for Beta. The quality team, which I am a part of, started hammering at B59 with all the weapons for weeks. We cycled these bits through most of the supported configurations, through all our internal weapons. Through the whole gamut of testing. Just to name a few: the unit, functional, compatibility, reliability, performance and so on. There were some respins along the way to fix the issues we felt would have blocked Beta feedback. And finally when we met the criteria we had set for our Beta, we announced victory and pushed those bits out. While some of us were working at stabilizing these beta bits, our post-beta work continued. And so the latest snapshot you see is B71, while Beta is based on B59.

Does all this talk about stability mean the beta build is perfect? Well, ofcourse not. It does have some imperfections. But based on our analysis of these imperfections or defects, we do not believe they should block our beta audience from providing their valuable feedback.

And if most of the new work is done now, why do we need another 8-9 months till GA (Fall 2006)? A valid question, unless you know what all goes into ensuring only the best quality, most compatible release goes out as Mustang GA. I'll go into these details sometime later. For now good luck with playing with Mustang Beta or the latest snapshot, whichever satiates your need. And don't hesitate to contact us for anything you feel we can do better.

Oh and a bunch of us from the Mustang team are blogging about diffrent topics including the new cool features, the Mustang contests, other logistics. Go check the blog carnival out....