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Thursday Feb 02, 2006

The Mustang Regressions Challenge!

During the past two and a half weeks I visited several customers (12 to be exact). During the visits I encouraged them to move to our latest and greatest Java release (5.0_06). Unfortunately, a lot of them have trouble moving from, say, the latest 1.4.2 to Tiger (5.0) due to API incompatibilities which will force them to retest and fiddle with their code. We are listening and we are trying to do our best to ensure smooth (or mostly smooth at least! if there's something clearly broken we will fix it!) transitions to the latest Java release. And we encourage you to try our latest Mustang releases out and identify such problems. For this we have launched The Mustang Regressions Challenge! Please report any incompatibilities between Tiger and Mustang; if you find a "biggie" you'll have a chance to win a Sun Ultra 20 workstation!

Posted at 04:16AM Feb 02, 2006 by tony in Sun  |  Comments[4]

Comments:

What are these API incompatabilities? Are they real and have they been submitted to the bug database?

Posted by 192.18.42.11 on February 02, 2006 at 07:09 AM EST #

Hi. Method signature changes seem to be one of the main culprits. Some customers tend to report them, some others do not (the latter try to use the latest release and just give up when it doesn't work). If you need to know more, please get in touch directly.

Posted by Tony Printezis on February 03, 2006 at 09:30 AM EST #

There are a couple of tools available for comparing the signatures of class libraries. I've used JDiff (http://jdiff.sourceforge.net/) for finding signature changes between JXTA versions. The NetBeans project also does automated monitoring and reporting of signature changes. From some of the reports they present it looks like they have some pretty fancy tools for tracking API changes. Besides the issue of signature changes I've always been surprised by the perception of brittleness that there is between Java versions. It seems like a real breakdown of WORA if people have to deploy their applications with a specific Java version (or if they believe that they can't change the Java version easily). I'd be really curious to learn why people's programs are so sensitive as to require a specific version of Java and/or break with every update.

Posted by Mike Duigou on November 28, 2006 at 10:35 PM EST #

Dear Tony,

I have just read your very interesting and informative presentation about Garbage Collection-Friendly Programming. I just have a simple a question. Could you please tell which tool you used to create the nice 3d-images you used there, for examples those on slide 40, 41,...’ I would be very thankful, if you could answer this question :-). I know it’s not the right place to post this question...so sorry

Nadine

Posted by Nadine Baker on May 30, 2008 at 12:18 PM EST #

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