Announcing the Consumer JRE (again!)

General Discussions
#1

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/enicholas/archive/2007/05/announcing_the.html

“The Consumer JRE will be a Java 6 update release delivered in the first half of 2008.”

“The JRE is being modularized, so that bits and pieces of it can be downloaded as needed. In the current prototype, the download needed to support a typical Swing program is between 3 and 4MB.”

Exciting shizzle :slight_smile:

#2

This is really really great news for game dev! :smiley:

#3

yup sounds brilliant, can’t wait to see how this turns out, if done right it’ll help the jre spread much more easily.

if its 3-4 meg just for swing apps, it’ll be interesting to see how small it can get for something like LWJGL Apps where swings/awt can be avoided. Also since Java now has a GPL licence, bundling this stripped/mini jre with games looks to be pretty cool.

#4

Here’s some more definitive info from Chet: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet/archive/2007/05/consumer_jre_le.html#DeploymentToolkit

And also:

[quote]Now we are finally rewriting the DirectX pipeline to mirror the capabilities that we have with our OpenGL pipeline, with fixes for robustness that make it a more viable default rendering pipeline.
[/quote]
Woo-hoo for Java2D! :smiley:

#5

Good news indeed. I sure hope this Consumer JRE will work out just as well as intended, but I trust it will be an improvement overall.

The Nimbus L&F is definitely an improvement over Metal (which was ugly from day 1), although I still dislike that ugly bold button text, and I think the frames’ edges are a bit too thick for my taste.

But why oh why isn’t the Platform L&F the default? One of the major complaints of Swing has always been that it looks and feels ‘unfamiliar’ (to put it mildly :)), and I think the cases where a cross-platform L&F is preferred are those rare corner cases.
If you want acceptance of java on the desktop, then don’t bother users with Look & Feels they’re not familiar with!

Of course this is also the fault of the application developers that don’t add that one extra line to get the Platform L&F, but I think Sun should make a statement here if they’re serious about desktop java.

And I hope they’ll fix the Windows L&F JFileChooser while they’re at it (it’s slow as hell and not quite the same as native Windows) :slight_smile:

#6

Nimbus isn’t there yet. JTree isn’t themed, it’s inconsistent here n there and right now it’s a lot slower then metal or ocean.

#7

personally don’t really like the nimbus theme but i do agree the native look and feel should be the default theme.

#8

Awsome news for game developers. No more bloated JRE downloads.

#9

[quote]The Kernel JRE’s installer includes jvm.dll, the other native files and hundreds of classes needed to boot the JVM, the Java Plug-In, Java Web Start, java.exe, javaw.exe, javaws.exe, the installation code, and various support libraries needed to support the installer (such as unpack200).

And it’s only 1.9MB.
[/quote]
;D ;D

#10

This is indeed the best news that’s come out of javaland for years.

Cas :slight_smile: