Sun has slipped the schedule on Java 6. The first release candidate is now due at the end of October and the final release tentatively in the first week of December. "Since the previous schedule adjustment, which Ray Gans described back in January, we’ve been working toward a final release date in late October. Following the second beta release in June, the code freeze for the release candidate was to have been at build 96 a few weeks ago, according to Mark Reinhold, chief engineer for the Java Platform Standard Edition, at Sun Microsystems.
"Unfortunately about fifty showstopper bugs remained after build 96, and the incoming bug rate is a bit higher than we’d like, so the freeze date was moved out two weeks to build 98 (last Friday) and two additional weeks of testing were added. Nobody likes schedule slips, but shipping a high-quality release is more important than hitting a particular date. (In a future entry I’ll talk more about what constitutes a "showstopper.")", says Mark.
With these changes the release candidate will now ship at the end of October and the final release will ship in the first week of December.
