4. Changes in Fedora for Developers
Some of the major improvements in 1.10 include:
Many graphics improvements and bug fixes, including support for shaped/translucent windows and hw/lw mixing
Performance gains with PKCS#11 provider
Numerous other VM stability and performance improvements that come with HotSpot 20
IcedTea6 1.10 provides many performance and stability and performance benefits over the 1.8 and 1.9 series that are in Fedora 13 and 14 respectively.
In addition to the IcedTea6 update, another major change on the Java front is the introduction of IcedTea-Web in Fedora. In previous releases, the Java plugin and Web Start implementations were packaged with the java-1.6.0-openjdk RPM. Starting with 1.10, the plugin and Web Start implementations are now developed independently as part of a separate project known as IcedTea-Web.
In addition to numerous bug fixes, some the major feature improvements in IcedTea-Web include:
NetX and plugin configuration can now be specified via a deployment.properties
file
System-level as well as user-level deployment.properties
files with locked configuration are supported
Applications and applets can now have a Look and Feel different from rest of IcedTea-Web
Native directories are correctly cleaned on exit
Cached files with special characters in file names are now handled correctly
Interfaces javax.jnlp.IntegrationService
and javax.jnlp.DownloadService2
are now available
javaws now supports a new -Xclearcache
option
Applications with non-public main classes are now supported.
JNLP files containing <component-desc> as well as <application-desc> will now work
JNLP files referenced in the applet tag are now parsed to detect applet properties
Applets are now double-buffered to eliminate flicker in ones that do heavy drawing
Not only does IcedTea-Web bring the above improvements to Fedora, it will also make bug fix turn-around time much shorter going forward, as it would no longer require a JDK RPM re-spin.
Maven is Java project management, project comprehension and build system tool.
Fedora 15 comes with
Maven version 3.0. It offers better stability and performance compared to previous versions, but the biggest changes shouldn't be noticed by users. Most work has been happening under the hood to simplify writing Maven plugins and further improve performance by building projects in parallel. It includes a new Maven API for component configuration, many improvements and bug fixes. Users of Maven are encouraged to read the Maven 3
Upstream Release Notes
Fedora 15 still provides maven2 package to support backward compatibility where needed.