Recently, a second beta of Java 6 was released, which triggered a patch for the Debian java-package package. It was a Bioclipse bug report today, however, which made me patch my java-package setup and install the beta.

So, next thing was to try to get the CDK compile with the Java 6 beta. Because our build system uses JavaDoc (anyone with a pointer with a easy to use Java parser, which parses JavaDoc too?), and because this setup is different for literally every platform and Java version, the build.xml needed some tweaking (patch 6719 and 6721). Additionally, a number of source files were marked as needing Java 1.5, while they actually depend on features introduced in Java 5 (aka 1.5) and which are present in Java 6 (aka 1.6) too, so that needed some tweaking too (patch 6720).

I have no idea what Java 6 will change and/or introduce, but I did note some comments on it being faster, which is always a good thing. The JUnit test timings seems to agree with this. While my Java 1.5.0_06 installation needed 204 seconds (no duplicates), Java 1.6.0_beta2 needed only 168 seconds (no duplicates), and improvement of 18%.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2006/08/cdk-and-java-6-beta.html.