So IBM has released Websphere 6.1, apparently the first Websphere version to run on Java5, only 20 months after JDK 1.5.0 was released. Pathetic. I had to read the article twice just to make sure I wasn’t misreading it. Meanwhile, we run Tomcat 3.3 on Java5 with no patches from Jakarta (even though 3.3.2 was released prior to the Java5 release). A JBoss version released in January of 2005 had full Java5 support.

It’ll be tough to make many fans in the development community with support like that. I just plain don’t get it. You’re IBM, a huge company and one of the heavyweights in the J2EE App Server space. You have near unlimited resources at your fingertips. And you take over a year and a half to adjust to a JVM upgrade that did little more than syntactical upgrades. We migrated our app, over 2000 classes, and the biggest effort was unwiring all of the spots where someone used enum as a variable name. Did we upgrade every class to use the latest and greatest Java5 features? No, what’s the point of that? IBM should have pushed a compatibility release as quickly as possible, and split that effort off of whatever other features went into this release. Developer support matters.

Jim Waldo is one of Sun’s techie guys, a researcher, not a product or marketing guy. He’s sharing the “challenges” of open sourcing Java, citing interoperability as a potentially competing interest. The session is mostly a somewhat interesting rah-rah session for what we have accomplished in the developer industry, what Sun and Java have accomplished, and where we’re going. Not a bad presentation for a pep rally, but not much meat here either.

I’m sitting at the opening session of the Atlanta Java Users’ Group with pretty much all of our development team. The schedule came out late, and the number of breakout sessions is down from last year, so I’m not sure we’ll benefit from sending 7 people, but we’ll see.

They appear to have accidental wireless access, courtesy of some local cafe. Access to power outlets also looks limited, but our IT folks set me up with a new massive battery for my Thinkpad, so it may be alright.

I probably won’t live-blog each session, but I’ll try and cover some highlights – last year, Sun let slip that they were going to free Java Studio Creator, so there may be some interesting tidbits to come.