Roadmap

ICU4J 4.2.1 with some important bug fixes merged back from ICU4J 4.4 code stream. This release maintenance update will be used for ICU4J plug-in in Eclipse 3.6 release. Following bug fixes will be merged into this release:

#6708 Peformance: Cache Numbering Systems / #7140 SimpleDateFormat constructor takes too much time on initializing NumberingSystem
NumberingSystem object was introduced in ICU4J 4.2. The implementation introduced performance degrade for NumberFormat instantiation performance up to 6000% (60 times slower).

#7107 Synchronization issue in TimeZone.getDisplayName - throws NPE from SimpleDateFormat.format
TimeZone.getDisplayName() delegates SimpleDateFormat to format time zone display name internally, but the instance of SimpleDateFormat is not synchronized. This issue has been there for long time and reproduced under high contention environment.

#7137 ICU4J SimpleDateForamt takes too much time for initializing DateFormatSymbols
This performance problem was reproted by Apach Harmony development by profiling the ICU4J implementation and IBM JDK corresponding. This issue has been there in previous releases.

#7169 DateTimePatternGenerator threaiding problem
DateTimePatternGenerator is probably not used by Eclipse RCP - so I think the priority is low. But this is a simple coding problem, so I think it is worth merging this.

#7227 BaseTimeZone#getSimpleTimeZoneRulesNear problem
Because of this problem, TimeZone#setRawOffset() throws IllegalArgumentException for time zone Asia/Novokuznetsk.