A serious milestone for any developer, no matter what your persuasion or preferred development platform. It's great to see Java 6 ship today and in response the Sun marketing machine is full gear with some strange headlines hitting my inbox late today. By any account this is a pretty large release for the Java platform, some of my favorite ingredients of course including JDBC 4.0, numerous JAXB/P/RPC updates, scripting language support and some impressive runtime performance improvements. Those of you who have also of have been paying attention to the progress of Apache Derby will also notice that for the first time Java ships with a database JavaDB. While as yet unproven in critical applications, its adoption is something to continue worth monitoring ....