June 28, 20045, 1.5, 2My limited understanding of the version number change (and I'm not at JavaOne to hear how they're spinning it) is that bumping the version number reflects all the changes to the language in this release. I certainly agree that if the Java version number is going to be incremented, this is the release to do it. The obvious thing would be to go from Java 1.4 to Java 2.0, of course, but "Java 2" means something else. That's what they did the last time the marketing department ran ahead of the engineers.... You'll notice that Tiger's new name is "J2SE 5.0". Not J5SE. I heard this explained like this: J2SE is not released in sync with J2EE and J2ME, so they can't change the 2 in those acronyms.
From what I"ve heard, I'm not convinced that the Java engineers are on board for this version number change. I believe, for example that java -version will continue to print 1.5. This could change, though. I also think that the compiler switch for compiling with Java 5 features will continue to be -source 1.5.
| TrackBack
|