Java 5 update 3

The java 5 update 1 was released a few months ago. It was not long after our country was ravaged by the tsunami. Even though the update was downloaded, I never had the chance to try it out. Days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months and update 1 became update 3. Finally I decided to download it and here are the comments.

The JDK-Netbeans combo download itself if 115Mb, expanding and installing it was a breeze thanks to the gui installer, and the installer seems to be pretty quick too.

My installation of previous versions were hardly pleasent all manner of errors come up when attempting to compile/run applications with it. From the surface they seem to have gone away with this new version.

I always prefer to keep class files and source files separate and in fact the best place for class files is the /dev/shm folder. When you place your classes in this folder what you are really doing is to keep them in memory without writing them to disk. That makes the compilation go that much faster (provided of course that you have lots of memory).

It isn't exactly obvious how you can change the output directory in Netbeans but I finally managed to track it down to the build.dir property in the /nbproject/project.properties file. Now to put this to the real test.