I strongly disagree Stefan. I know memory is getting cheaper and more abundant but being conservative with memory should be important. What if all desktop applications had the attitude "its just RAM, no need to deallocate". RAM would become scarce! Our desktop application has to run on the same desktop as other Java apps.
Here is a good example of what I am talking about:
Notepad.exe uses 2.6 MB under TaskManager
The Notepad example that comes with jdk1.5 uses 19.1 MB according to TaskManager.
Why?!
The Notepad example really doesn't do much. When you make a more complex desktop application like NetBeans or Eclipse, you can be using 67 MB of RAM. C++ desktop applications seem to use much less memory. This coupled with the "Java is slow" myth makes IT managers think twice before developing desktop applications with Java.
Don't get me wrong, I am a advocate of Java. It is an elegant and powerful language. It is also very portable, which is why we chose it in the first place. I just wish Sun would fix this problem or at least explain it so that the Java haters of the world would have one less excuse.