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I just downloaded and installed the beta release of JDK 6 a.k.a. Mustang. And here's some very superficial impressions.

• The download is almost the same size as JDK 5.
• Both Rhino and Jython started up under JDK 6 Beta with no problems. This was not the case for JDK 5. JEdit 4.2 works fine too.
• javap output still looks funny.
• The JDK bin directory contains the following new experimental tools (some documented here):
  • java-rmi: ?
  • jhat: Heap Dump Browser - Starts a web server on a heap dump file (e.g., produced by jmap -dump), allowing the heap to be browsed.
  • jmap: Memory Map for Java - Prints shared object memory maps or heap memory details of a given process or core file or a remote debug server.
  • jrunscript: Script shell for Java - Runs a script. (See Paul Jensen's article.)
  • jstack: Stack Trace for Java - Prints a stack trace of threads for a given process or core file or remote debug server.
  • schemagen: ?
  • wsgen: ?
  • wsimport: ?
  • xjc: ?

This doesn't feel like the big jump that we experienced with JDK 5. (But if you know what "shared object memory" is, I'd like to hear about it.)

Interestingly, in the OCI Java lunch yesterday, most of the developers are still using JDK 1.4 at work. They didn't move to JDK 5 for various reasons. It would be interesting to see how organizations manage the transition to JDK 6. May be they can just skip 5 and go to 6 directly?

I have a feeling that the lack of a 5.1 version has really hurt the adoption of JDK 5.