[quote]On the whole, 1.5 doesn’t have many powerful features - to most people it’s mainly performance improvements (doesn’t affect the developer!), bugfixes and cosmetic improvements.
[/quote]
:o
But we do like the high resolution timer, do we?
I didn’t say it had no new features, nor no powerful ones; but compare 1.5 to 1.4, and see how the latter introduced a lot more new functionality, especially in the “major” category (logging, NIO, XML, regex, … )
You could even argue (especially for games developers) that NIO on it’s own was as big as all the new stuff from 1.5 put together, since it finally unlocked the door between java and native memory - hence making it far easier to talk to hardware, and at a higher level e.g. opening up OpenGL to almost 1:1 performance with C++.
If you look back historically, Sun have tended to put the really big stuff in ever other major release: 1.2, 1.4, 1.6 (some of the features I’ve most been waiting for are currently scheduled for 1.6 - e.g. IIRC fullscreen, proper shared memory, etc). 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 each introduced important new features, but much less so than their even counterparts. At least, IMHO.
Although there doesn’t seem to be too many extra features in 1.5, things like generics have caught my attention. But the biggest snag I worry about would be missing out of the vast number of people with ‘only’ 1.4 installed.
Before choosing which version to code to wasn’t really a choice, what with LWJGL, Jogl etc. all needing the NIO from 1.4. It can still be tricky enough to get people to upgrade their JVM, so I’ll probably be sticking to 1.4 (and thats without even thinking about bugs that might be lurking).
What are other people going to be using? It seems strage to actually have a choice in version for once. :o
Haha, looks like my uni’s finally got around to removing my web space. Guess thats a hint I should get my own hosting sorted out…
I’m learning java, so I haven’t made a serious app yet. I’m looking at how code executes, and learning different apis. I think for java begginers theres not much reason for experimenting with difficult or dangerous betas, I’ll save that stuff for later. For now, I’m going to read a lot more about java, and hopefully, sometime I’ll make something good.
Thanks for all the help.
Chris 
I saw the crew at the JavaOne BOF. Thanks guys; wish the session lasted longer!
why thank you for this necro, the first page of this thread was quite an interesting read :o