- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything - Edward John Phelps
Java auto-updater fails to see new releases
JAVA HAS BEEN making lots of progress lately, with performance improvements and a new JavaFX update. But if you rely on Java's auto-update mechanism, you will often stay one release behind. Strangely, Sun says it's for our own good.
Over the weekend news started circulating about Sun Microsystems' latest release of Java, namely Java 6, update 14 (J6u14). This latest update has been tested with IE8 and adds Windows 7 to the list of supported operating systems in addition to Vista SP2 and Server 2008, plus the Linux and Solaris versions, and comes in versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, including a 64-bit plug-in for web browsers.
Since we had Java's "auto-updater" installed in our 64-bit Windows test system set to check daily, we thought it would pick it up and install it "automagically". That wasn't the case. Finally, we had to go to Sun's java.sun.com website to do a manual download. If instead you go to www.java.com, the Java promotional site which also offers downloads, you will see "update 13" - the previous release - listed as the latest. Even funnier, if you visit the Java Test Page with J6U14 installed, the web site will tell you that "you are currently using a newer version of JRE than the one available at Java.com".
The Java.com web site lists Java 6 update 13 - the earlier version
The oddity is that near two years ago, we INQuired to Sun Microsystems about this discrepancy between the Java.com and Java.sun.com web sites, and Sun's official reply was that consumers are different than developers, and that while java.com is the "consumer" site, Java.sun.com is the "developers" site.
Java.sun.com always lists the latest Java version available
If you check the release notes for the latest Update 14, you will see there are plenty of reasons to update, including a new release of the Hotspot VM which includes faster performance, a new release of JavaDB, and the new "G1" Garbage Collector which promises more effective dynamic memory management with less interruptions to applications, plus the usual tons of bug fixes.
Sun´s auto-updater said Update 13 is the latest. It´s not.
Sun's official excuse for the discrepancy between sites: "When a release is fully ready, we push it to java.sun.com immediately. But we let it bake for a few days between that push and any push to java.com, just in case there are any issues that come up with this wider distribution that we want to prevent before exposing it to the larger consumer base that will get the java.com bits. This is particularly important since the releases available through the java.com download are also the releases that are pushed through our auto-update mechanism; the extra time between these pushes allow more sanity-checking for this wider audience."
Auto-updater with Java6u13 does not see Update 14
The official excuse for making the auto-updater sometimes not see the latest release on java.sun.com: "We sometimes do not push a particular update to java.com because, as I mentioned above, the release on java.com is also the one pushed through auto-update. In order to avoid pushing too many updates out there, which users might not want, we try to regulate the updates to only those with critical fixes or which are available after some reasonable timeframe since the last update. So although we may feel good about some particular update release and want people to use it in general, it may only be available on java.sun.com because we prefer to wait for the next update to actually push out the update to users."
Suffice to say that this humble scribbler does not agree with this silliness. You don't see Microsoft delivering older releases of Silverlight to "end users" or Apple making a distinction between end users and developers with Quicktime. With the recent release of Java 6 update 14 and its neat improvements together with JavaFX 1.2, it's time for this decoupling of web sites, which has been going on for over two years, to end. µ
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To my opinion software makers installing update checkers should be put against the wall. Do I really want to have hundreds of little programs running in the background constantly calling home to see if there's an update ?
Come on...
Sun is improving though... their earlier Java releases even didn't uninstall the old version.
That is not new. The practice this already since years. But as java updates are less commonly applied most useres don't notice it. (and i just know because of betanews) It usually takes a few weeks till you get the update through the updater
Probably born of much experience of things going wrong with stuff.
But in the spirit of transparency they could simply give customers the choice and label the versions they are not sure about as betas and give the updater a toggle to ignore or download betas, then have it set to ignore by default.
Then at last we would all be equal in the eyes of the machine.
FIN
I rely on my machine for major parts of my work, and there is nothing worse than having it go down because of bugs in the "latest and greatest" software. I think this notion of theirs is both wise and commendable. I almost never download the latest upgrades of anything, and I have seldom had my machine down while browsing the forums filled with complaints of new problems with new installs.
No beta test is as sound as the "real world".
I disable all auto update checkers as I manually do it on my machine, I have windows update disabled and I manually check every 2nd tuesday because there's point in it always checking when there's practically nothing to download plus it can slow system performance down sometimes.
For Java I only know whens there an update because of Filehippo.com I usually check every week and they have practically a new version of my drivers, java and ccleaner etc.
Something struck me while reading this that made wee myself a little bit... Well, okay. Mainly I was just a bit concerned.
So, Sun are saying they wouldn't release updates to general users for a few days, in case there was a critical issue with it. But most enterprise customers skip the auto-updater, and pull updates from java.sun.com as vulnerabilities are reported, do some minimal app testing and deploy to the enterprise within around 72 hours (depending on SLAs).
As the person responsible for deploying these sort of updates in my company, I'll be waiting around for updates to hit the consumer site in future - unless Sun gives a more clear stance on whether an update is GA release, or "go for it, but if it cacks things up, soz - lol".
:\
Java sucks big time, that's all.
Why no mention of the (beta) Java 7?
http://download.java.net/jdk7/binaries/