Bwah?

The Java site is down.  Java.sun.com is down.  I finally have a really good reason to upgrade to JDK 1.4.2 and the whole benighted site is down!

JDK 1.4.2 introduces the Preferences API, which gets you away from Properties objects and into a whole new system of Preference trees.  There is one tree for system preferences, and one for each user's preferences.  Properties objects seem useful to start with, but I ended up skipping it and going to an XML config file, which required JDOM, XML parsing, all kinds of extra work, and it was still easier to deal with.

So I'm downloading the JDK docs from Australia.  It's 34 MB compressed, the download rate is slow, I'm less than halfway there in thirteen minutes of waiting, and I can't get into the docs to find the other goodies waiting.  Numerous bug fixes in this release, and JDK 1.5 beta is due out in September.  Mac OS X comes with Java 1.4 as standard, which is a problem when you're writing Java 1.3 code.  Something goes wrong with the screen refresh if you run 1.3 code on a 1.4 JVM.

(11:07pm:  Download complete)