Software Update: Oracle Java 7 Update 65

Oracle has released update 65 for version 7.0 of both the Java Standard Edition development kit and runtime environment. It is a regular and planned update, which should solve more than 130 problems. This update, which ships with JavaFX version 2.2.65, can be used until October 14, when Oracle expects to have the successor ready. The complete release notes for this release are as follows:

New Java Control Panel option to disable sponsors

Currently, to disable sponsor offers at the time of installation, the user can de-select the option during installation or can pass SPONSORS=0 as a commandline option.

In this release, a new Java Control Panel(JCP) option to disable sponsors is available. To use this option, go to JCP’s “Advanced” tab, and check or uncheck “Suppress sponsor offers when updating Java”.

This option is applicable to 32 and 64 bit Windows operating systems.

New JAXP processing limit property – maxElementDepth

A new property, maxElementDepth, is added to provide applications the ability to set limit on maximum element depth in an xml file that they parse. This may be helpful for applications that may use too much resources when processing an xml file with excessive element depth.

• Name: http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxp/properties/maxElementDepth
• Definition: Limit the maximum element depth
• Value: A positive integer. 0 is treated as no limit. Negative numbers are treated as 0.
• Default value: 0
• System property: jdk.xml.maxElementDepth

For more details, see Processing Limits from JAXP tutorial trail.

See 8031541 (not public).

Bug Fixes

This release contains fixes for security vulnerabilities. For more information, see Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory.

For a list of bug fixes included in this release, see JDK 7u65 Bug Fixes page.

The following are some of the notable bug fixes in this release:

Area: client-libs/AWT
Synopsis: Using RMI from a restricted environment may cause a NullPointerException.

If an application uses RMI and runs in a restricted environment (ie. Java Plugin, Java Web Start), it may not work. In particular, if you run a UI from an RMI callback, a NullPointerException is likely to be thrown.

see 8019274.

Area: other-libs/corba
Synopsis: org.omg.CORBA.ORBSingletonClass loading no longer uses context class loader

The system property org.omg.CORBA.ORBSingletonClass is used to configure the system-wide/singleton ORB. The handling of this system property was changed in the 7:55 am release to require that the system wide/singleton ORB be visible to the system class loader.

In this release, the handling of this system property has been reverted to match the behavior found in JDK versions prior to 7u55 release, ie the singleton ORB is once again located using the thread context class loader of the first thread, to call the no- argument ORB.init method. The change is made to support applications which depend on this behavior.

Note that this change is applicable to 8u20, 7u65, 6u85 and 5.0u75 releases. For JDK 9, the new behavior, where the system wide/singleton ORB needs to be visible to the system class loader, will continue.

see 8046603.