Differences between J701 and J602

Question

I am going to install the J environment on an Ubuntu box and a WinXP box. The http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm site doesn't seem to give a detailed explanation of the difference between J701 and J602. All I could find from that site:

J701 and J602 are both stable releases. J701 introduces significant change and is for users, new or old, who want the challenge of the bleeding edge. J602 is for legacy users and those who want, especially in Windows, a gentler experience.

... and another mention that the GUI for J701 is a complete re-design versus earlier versions.

Please expand on the above differences, J programmers.

Answer 1

Code improvements are listed here

Release highlights, overview and some links are listed here

Overall, I'm disappointed too from the lack of "official" documentation. Sometimes, even the vocabulary is outdated, incomplete or just wrong; it's a pity for such a great language.

If you're just learning J, go with 6.02 since many Labs haven't been ported to 7.01 yet. Other than that, I would go with 7.01.

Answer 2

In my opinion the description on the website about J7 being bleeding edge, while true when J7 was first released, is now a bit of an exaggeration. That is not to say that J7 has the same level of completeness especially in terms of cohesive documentation about the environment (Note the base language itself and its documentation is as robust as before - little change from J6).

The biggest change is the change in GUI environment. J6 used Windows driver on Windows and Java Swing on Linux & Mac. J7 has two main GUI environments, Gtk and a browser-based (javascript/css). On Linux at least (and probably Mac too) the Gtk GUI is a big improvement on Java Swing.

Early on in the J7 getting the Gtk IDE working on Windows could be a bit tricky however there are now Windows installers that simplify the installation of J complete with Gtk binaries and the Gtk IDE.

Another significant change is the move of many scripts/packages that used to be included in the installer to the J Application Library (JAL). The main driver for this was to enable them to be updated more frequently and by the community. A number of frequently used scripts (e.g. files, strings) are now loaded as the system starts rather than requiring the user to load them manually.

If you're using J interactively or writing scripts that don't rely on GUI then I think it would be a fairly easy decision to go to J7. If you want to build predominantly GUI apps then both will work, but there is less documentation and simple examples for J7 (on either Gtk or javascript/css).