Re: Problem start JSWAT

Mark,

You should always be using the latest J2 SDK. At the moment, that's
1.4.2_01. While your experience shows that new bugs do get introduced,
by and large the quality of the JRE and the SDK software have improved
steadily.

What I usually do when an update comes along is keep two generations
installed at a time. When I'm satisfied that I can continue work with
a new SDK, I'll remove the earlier one.

For example, right now I'm beta testing a tool called the Java
Performacne Validator (a performance measuring tool from Software
Verification Ltd: <http://www.softwareverify.com/>) and it will only
run against the 1.4.1 JVM (it checks the serial number associated with
the JVM and balks at the number supplied by 1.4.2). So for as long as
this is the case, I have to keep 1.4.1 around, but I use it only for
that tool.

The same is true with drivers. It took Matrox and Sun a few go-arounds
to get all the kinks out of the video driver interface. I had Java
GUIs that misbehaved only under Java applications but which were
improved by new Matrox drivers and likewise display bugs that were
fixed by mew JRE releases from Sun.

I don't know anything about the nature of the GDI interface and how
its used by the native portions of the Java GUI libraries, but clearly
it's a complex interface with complex interactions necessitated by the
performance-critical nature of graphical display. I'm sure there's
more than ample room for subtle bugs.

Note that Sun recently release J2SDK 1.4.2_01, which is mainly a
bug-fix release. See <http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html> to
get the lastest and read the release notes.

Good luck.

Randall Schulz


Mark Arnold wrote:
> Thanks for the help so far, guys! I havent gotten to try it yet,
> but I will (hopefully later today). Just one question: I never had
> problems with JDK1.3 and earlier. Netbeans worked with 1.3, just
> not with 1.4 Did the other people that had all the display
> driver/card problems also only have it with 1.4 but not with
> earlier versions?
> 
> MARK