A recent blog post let’s the world know that the Java Kernel will be a part of JDK 6 Update 4.  There is not a lot of information around what this means outside of Ethan Nicholas’s blog entry in May and some of his earlier posts describing the intent project and the official announcement about the project.  Seems like a cool idea to shrink the default download size of the JRE, but it is hard to understand the impact of this.

This really irritates the hell out of me.  How can there not be an easy to find example and demonstration of this functionality?  Maybe I am just blind, but I could not find anything from Ethan’s blog pages or by searching Google where I could see examples and understand how the implementation works.  Will there be tight coupling with JavaFX?  How significantly will it reduce start up times.  Is this really such a minor feature it should be released in a JDK update rather than JDK 7?  This announcement seems to create more questions than it answers.

Some other discussion pages: