Something new in JDK 6

(IMHO) I have to admit, Oracle is doing a nice job managing the java releases. They have added the jvisualvm option (blogging this feature soon), added the G1 GarbageCollector to the later releases of JDK 6 (_14 to be exact). This was slated as one of the big performance items in JDK 7. Today I found a very cool new feature ... not often used, but still a huge benefit.

Java classpath (-cp or -classpath) arguemnt in JDK 6 now supports the wildcard feature.

For example, if you want to included 3 external libraries in a bootstrap script you would have to use the following:

#!/bin/bash
libSource=/opt/lib/mysql-version.jar:/opt/lib/gwt-version.jar:/opt/lib/j2ee-version.jar
java -classpath $libSource target/myExecutableJar-version.jar

With JDK 6, it is much easier (and cleaner) to implement. So much so that a bootstrap might not be necessary.

java -classpath /opt/lib/'*' target/myExecutableJar-version.jar