On the limits with JDK 1.5…

Last few days I have been taking the features of JDK 1.5 to the limits, often for uses its wasn’t envisioned and I have to say I am pleasantly surprised in most cases. My voyage was into JPDA, live code transformation capabilities, Swing text, shutdown hooks, rtf & html packages, new language features including but not limited to auto boxing/unboxing, enhanced for loop, enums, static import etc., byte code modifications etc.

My only disappointment was with Swing HTML packages, which doesn’t seem to handle much of the available web documents (despite its claims) including front page of tomcat docs etc. Its read and write capabilities are equally dismal. The rtf package reads ok, but doesn’t write properly.

Overall these packages in swing are a disappointment.

For the rest I would strongly recommend you to delve into JDK 1.5. It is a pleasure to develop with, so much so I am groaning now to develop for a client who is still of 1.4 (ugh! ).
Developing code is much easier with the new language features.

Overall it is a well thought out release.