For me, as a developer in general, the .NET Framework 2.0 came to offere a whole bunch of problems that I experienced in the past. It still has its less stronger points and its weaknesess, things that you have to workaround in order to achieve other things; but now its not the time to write about these :) – now it’s the time to take a fast glance at Mustang :D
What’s Mustang you may wonder — well, it’s the new version of the Sun Java SDK. Actually the official name is “Java SE 6″. For the moment we can only get some snapshots (true, for all the platforms). The final version is supposed to be out somwhere in fall 2006.
The interesting thing that I have noticed about browsing some “dev docs” from Sun regarding Mustang is that this JDK trys to collaborate better and bette with the Windows OS. I saw many places where improvements were made:
- the new Desktop API
- the new System Tray – which we must admit, comes at a very small time interval after .NET Fw 2.0 brought out the new control for the System Tray :) 
- java.io.File now supports more than 255 chars on Windows OS 
- imporving the Windows L&F by using MS’s API for component rendering & assuring that Swing looks cool on Longhorn – more and better graphics hardware acceleration on Windows
-Dsun.java2d.d3d=true
This means that the native code for Windows was rewritten as to take advantage of Direct3D :D
… and so on

But then, this fetaures are just a small part of all the new Java capabilities and bug fixes. For a more comprehensive list take a look here.

Without making any rash comments, I’m looking forward to seeing the Mustang run wild on my system and test its new features. I don’t think that for the moment it will bring me back to Java from .NET, but who knows? As I wrote in my previous entry, it’s good to keep you perspective open and know each tool you have so you can better tackle the problems that might appear.

Enjoy Mustang! [ while i download a AMD64 bit version of it :D ]