Played with final version of JDK 1.6 this morning, still hot off the assembly line. Ran all my code and tools through it without not a whiff of trouble. It also seemingly faster, at least Eclipse seemed snappier. Too bad it's not available on Mac yet. Anyway, I liked it enough to deploy it to my server. Yup. This blog is running on JDK 1.6 server VM.
Going through the list of new features, built-in script support API (javax.script) is a nice-to-see although I think BSF met everyone's needs. I couldn't find any script performance related info. I was under the impression that Sun was working to improve scripting language performance on JVM. Oh well. Java2D performance improvements are impressive too but, unless I am mistaken, only Swing apps will benefit and Java is not so hot for GUI apps anyway.
I am also not so hot on Sun bundling Rhino, Derby, and a minimal HTTP server with JDK 1.6. I would rather see Sun expand its Java Update service to download extra third-party libraries as needed and install critical patches automatically.