14 DAY TRIAL // After more than two years of development, Sun Microsystems announced yesterday the final release of Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6. Java SE 6 is the current major release of the Java SE platform that has full support from NetBeans IDE 5.5 software.
Sun notifies on the release notes of Java 6 some problems that might happen in some Linux systems: "The Java VM may be unstable in a chroot(3) environment on some versions of Linux if the /proc filesystem is not mounted. This is due to the fact that some Linux libraries and VM routines attempt to extract information (processor counts, stack boundaries, and memory configuration) from the /proc filesystem. These routines may failover to incorrect defaults or crash, particularly if the process is multithreaded. To detect whether this Linux bug exists, issue the getconf _NPROCESSORS_CONF shell command from the chroot(3) environment. It should return the correct number of processors on your system. If it doesn't, you need to mount the /proc filesystem in order to run Java inside a chroot(3) file system."
Highlights of Java 6:
New Security Features and Enhancements
￭ Native platform Security (GSS/Kerberos) integration. ￭ Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) login module that employs LDAP authentication ￭ New Smart Card I/O API
Integrated Web Services
￭ New API for XML digital signature services for secure web services ￭ New Client and Core Java Architecture for XML-Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 APIs ￭ New support for Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0
Scripting Language Support (JSR 223)
￭ New framework and API for scripting languages ￭ Mozilla Rhino engine for JavaScript built into the platform
Enhanced Management and Serviceability
￭ Improved JMX Monitoring API ￭ Runtime Support for dTrace (Solaris 10 and future Solaris OS releases only) ￭ Improved memory usage analysis and leak detection
Increased Developer Productivity
￭ JDBC 4.0 support (JSR 221) ￭ Significant library improvements ￭ Improvements to the Java Platform Debug Architecture (JPDA) & JVM Tool Interface
Improved User Experience
￭ look-and-feel updates to better match underlying operating system ￭ Improved desktop performance and integration ￭ Enhanced internationalization support
An in-depth overview of all the enhancements and new features of the Java SE 6 can be found here and you can view the release notes of this release here.
You can download Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 for Linux now from Softpedia.