The “Break it Down” Blog

Wow, I was over on Chet Haase’s blog reading about the Consumer JRE… something that up until now I thought just some marketing idea for a JSR that would be filed and possibly make it into Java in 7.0 or later… it seems not only is that not the case, but it will be rolled out in a patch for Java 6 (e.g. 1.6.0_02).

Not impressed? Why not try taking a gander at what it will bring with it… this blew me away:

Quickstarter: Radically reduce the startup time for Java applications and applets.

Java Kernel: Reduce the time-to-install-and-launch when the user needs to install the JRE in order to run an application.

Deployment Toolkit: Enable easy detection and installation of the JRE.

Installer Improvements: Improve the user experience of installation.

Windows Graphics Performance: Enable default graphics acceleration for simple and advanced 2D rendering.

Nimbus Look & Feel : Release a new cross-platform look & feel based on Synth.

The Nimbus LNF we’ve covered here before, but as a quick reminder, it’s a slick update to the Ocean Metal LNF that Sun shipped in Java 5:

The Quickstarter is important to everyone trying to deploy applications and applets and it seems that a Java Windows service will exist to page the cached runtime files into ram, so when the VM spins up, it’s just starting itself up and reading the runtime libraries from ram (e.g. rt.jar I believe)

Java Kernel is another huge feature allowing applications that don’t have the required JRE on the host system to startup up after pulling down modular portions of the JRE and not the entire thing. Chet posted this chart of the improvements in startup time when only the necessary portions of the needed JRE were pulled down when launching an app:

The Graphics Performance on Windows is another major rewrite of the Swing/Java2D rendering pipeline to utilize Direct3D on Windows for every operation and not just line and fill operations as it was before.

Overall whatever they are calling the Consumer JRE is turning into an umbrella project for basically fixing every complaint anyone has ever had about Java on the desktop… very nice.

Update #1: This turned into a great conversation over on JavaLobby.