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David Herron: Recently we made Java SE 6 update 10 available for beta testing. Beta testing is a period in product release cycles where testing is taken to people outside the product team, and those "external" testers bang on it with their applications and let the product team know what's wrong (or not).

I find the following snippet Java platform detection code interesting:

<script src="http://java.com/js/deployJava.js"></script>
<script language="JavaScript">function detectJRE() {
  var list = deployJava.getJREs();
  var result = "";

  if (list.length == 0) {
    alert ('No Detectable Java Platforms are Installed');
  } else {
    result = list[0];
    for (var i=1; i < list.length; i++) {
      result += ", " + list[i];
    }
    alert("You have the following Java Platform(s) installed: \n" + result);
  }
}</script>

And you can try it out here:

Unfortunately, here's what I get on my home computer:

This is on a Debian GNU/Linux amd64 4.0 platform. We haven't had the Java plugin or Java Web Start for quite some time now. It looks like we'll get the plugin in early 2009, according to Bug ID: 4802695.