Not the BitTorrent of some particular movie or game, but the torrent of changes to the JDK that were held up pending a final blessing on the OpenJDK Mercurial transition. How do I, a non-Sun employee know this? Because I'm subscribed to the build-dev mailing list (which seems to be getting the Mercurial changeset notification emails), and on Wednesday (March 26th), one such email contained 72 new changesets, ranging from extensions to the query API for JMX 2.0:

6602310: Extensions to Query API for JMX 2.0

6604768: IN queries require their arguments to be constants

Summary: New JMX query language and support for dotted attributes in queries.

to bug fixes in javaw.exe for the Windows JRE:

6596475: (launcher) javaw should call InitCommonControls

Summary: javaw does not show error window after manifest changes.

to some changes to the Process class to better allow for IO redirection:

4960438: (process) Need IO redirection API for subprocesses

and more beyond that.

I have to say, I'm getting a little giddy watching all these things flow into the JDK--it's been a while since I just sat and watched the build notification messages on a large project like this, and it always gives me this weird sense of accomplishment, even though it's not work that I'm doing or arguably even care about. But it should stand as a clear sign to anybody who think Java-the-platform is "done"--the guys at Sun certainly don't think so, and more importantly, are putting in the effort to improve it.

Except now, we can see the work being done, which makes all the difference in the world.

Some of you may remember that on several speaker panels I was on, I was a bit bullish (on the surface of things) about the OpenJDK process. I think my exact comments were, "I think for the majority of Java developers, this is a 'No Big Deal, Move Along, Nothing to See Here' kind of step." I still believe that, in fact: I believe that to the vast majority of Java developers, the fact that anybody can now see the sausage being made yields no real advantage, and therefore is of no real interest.

But to the handful of Java developers who refuse to see the JVM or the Java libraries (or even the Java compiler) as a black box, this is huge. We can now not only post the bugs that we run across during development, and more importantly, subscribe to the mailing lists, watch for the bug fix notification, apply the Mercurial changeset that patches the bug, and if the patch doesn't work, notify Sun. But if the patch does work, not only can we confirm the bug's elimination, but we can move beyond it, even before the production release of the next Java build. It may not be something you do on a regular basis, but when you're completely blocked waiting for a bug fix from Sun...

... that's huge.