Preview builds of Jigsaw available

[Alan Bateman]

We now have a download page on java.net to host preview builds from Oracle:

http://jdk8.java.net/jigsaw/

This should be useful to those that want to try out Project Jigsaw 
and/or the current prototype of the modular JDK without needing to build 
it themselves.

The preview builds come in two forms:

- "JDK modules image". This is essentially equivalent to the normal JDK 
download except that everything is pre-installed as modules.

- The other download choice is for those that wish to experiment with a 
ready-to-assemble JDK. The download contains an image that is a base 
runtime and also contains a directory of jmod packages that are the JDK 
modules. These modules can be installed with the included jmod tool as 
needed.

At this time there isn't a download for Mac OS X, that should come soon 
(a small issue meant it didn't make the initial push). Another issue is 
that the Solaris downloads are the 32-bit binaries only for now.

As these are preview builds they will of course be issues and bugs. The 
main issue that people will likely run into is that crypto is currently 
disabled. There are also several areas in the JDK that require API and 
implementation changes to work as modules and that will come in time.

Thanks to Roger Yeung, David Katleman, Christine Lu from the Release 
Engineering team in Oracle for making these builds available. At this 
time we haven't decided how often to update the bundles so it will 
likely be "as needed" for now.

-Alan.