Since this is an early access program, the naming is kind of geeky. But that's OK. I imagine when it is finally released in the middle of 2008, it will be named Java SE 6 Update 5 or some such. (It installs to jdk1.6.0_05 or jre1.6.0_05.)
Also since this is an early access release, the installation process is a little bit different from the normal released versions of Java. I have been trained to just download the JDK and expect the JDK installation to also fire off a sub-installation of the JRE. Not so with 6uN. To try to run Applets with it, I have to either hand edit my registry or download the JRE.
[weiqi@gao]$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_05-ea"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_05-ea-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_05-ea-b04, mixed mode, sharing)
"Applets?" you ask. Yes, Applets. As I explained 155 days ago, Java applets, or something like it, is having a comeback. And this time, it just might work. I'm not predicting that Sun will win. As a matter of fact, I wish every product in this space wins. However, what I can predict is that classical web app development will fade away as a viable IT option within 3 years. Surely Google and Yahoo and Amazon.com will still be putting out web apps, but for the most part, ordinary people won't be writing HTML or even thinking HTML anymore.
Back to my experiment with 6uN. After I figured out that I need to download and install the JRE in addition to the JDK, everything snapped into place. After reboot (I'm on WinXP Pro SP2) a Windows service called JQS (for Java Quick Start) is started. This small footprint service reads the Java runtime files periodically to load them to the operating systems file cache. This way, when a Java process is started, either from the command line or from the browser plugin, slow disk access is performed.
And it worked. Here is the timing of a hello world Java program without JQS:
[weiqi@gao]$ time java Foo
Hello, world.
real 0m2.176s
user 0m0.015s
sys 0m0.031s
Here is the samething with JQS:
[weiqi@gao]$ time java Foo
Hello, world.
real 0m0.151s
user 0m0.047s
sys 0m0.000s
That's a 93% reduction in start up time.
What this means is that the perceived slowness of Java that has been bugging everybody since the start of the Java era has finally gone away.
The Java Kernel + Modules feature is not part of this early access release. I hope that when that feature is enabled, the startup time will be further improved. And people will look at Java client development with a different eye.
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