Ed Ort
June 28, 2004

Great Stuff Here Now -- More Coming Soon

There's a lot of great new stuff in the Java technology platform today, and even more is on the way. That's the clear message that the chief architects of the Java platform, Sun V.P. and Fellow, Graham Hamilton, and Sun Distinguished Engineers Tim Lindholm and Bill Shannon, delivered to an extremely large and enthusiastic audience in their technical general session "Java Platform Update--Roadmap & Big Directions." So what's this great new stuff?

Here's a summary:

• Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) Version 5.0 (code name "Tiger"). This new release of the Java platform includes a very large number (almost 100) of Java Specification Requests (JSRs) and other updates designed to improve ease of development, speed performance, and extend monitoring and management capabilities. Even core XML support has been enhanced. If you're wondering why Tiger is J2SE "5.0" instead of the traditional J2SE "1.x", Hamilton noted that "because J2SE 5.0 is our biggest update to the platform since the original 1.0, it felt kind of stupid that we were still calling things 1.1, 1.2, ... And with a big roaring Tiger, we wanted to change the numbering system, so we're now going to use the 5.0 number for J2SE, and similarly Jave 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is going to move to 5.0. Future releases will be 6.0 and 7.0."
  
  To underscore how many changes are incorporated into the Tiger release, Hamilton included a slide that was literally covered with new and enhanced features. Tiger is currently available as a Beta 2 release. A Release Candidate is targeted for August and the final release should be available on September 30th.
  
  To help introduce the Tiger release, an eight-week old tiger cub named "Java" joined Hamilton on stage. Hamilton said that "we chose the name Tiger for the J2SE 5.0 release because tigers are totally wonderful. We also wanted to give the impression of strength, power, and maybe a little fierceness." Perhaps more cute than fierce, Java (the tiger cub), still made a big impact.
  
  
• J2SE 6.0 (code name "Mustang") and J2SE 7.0 (code name "Dolphin"). These releases are currently in the planning stage. Mustang is scheduled for availability in early 2006, Dolphin in mid-to-late 2007. These releases will make even more advances into ease of development, monitoring and management, and XML and web services.
• Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME). There's a lot of focus here on providing common services for wireless devices (valuable for games and text messaging), supporting enterprise (rich data) services, and in easing device development and customization. Lindholm highlighted a number of the many JSRs that are being incorporated into J2ME. These JSRs cover a wide swath of territory that includes web services, security and trust services, and scalable vector graphics. JTWI (the low-end wireless stack) is also an area that bears watching. Lindholm asked the audience to keep an eye out for the next release of JTWI and be vocal as far as feedback.
• Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is a very powerful platform, but Shannon conceded that J2EE is difficult to get started. "Even simple applications need a lot of boilerplate code." So the question the J2EE team asked was "Can we keep the power of J2EE, but make more typical development tasks simpler?" Shannon said that the group thinks they can, and that's the focus of J2EE 5.0. Targeted for the second half of 2005, J2EE 5.0 puts heavy emphasis on ease of development. One of the J2EE technologies where this will be readily apparent is Enterprise JavaBeans technology. As an example, Shannon showed the code for a sample session bean and compared it to what it would look like in J2EE 5.0. Thirteen lines of code dropped to five -- and shorter lines at that. Shannon said that the intent is to "remove boilerplate code, rely on defaults whenever possible, and drastically reduce the need for deployment descriptors." The plan for reduced reliance on deployment descriptors leverages class annotations (a new feature in J2SE 5.0).

Quality is a recurrent theme in all these efforts. Hamilton said that the number one theme for Tiger is quality, as evidenced by stability, robustness, and compatibility. "We want all of your existing applications to work on top of Tiger." Hamilton also mentioned that the follow-on releases, Mustang and Dolphin, will carry on the quality theme "our goal is to ship no release before it's time."

The ease-of development goal in Tiger impelled the largest set of language updates in the history of Java technology releases since 1995. Some of these changes include:

• Generic types, which allow developers to declare the type of a collection
• Typesafe enums, which provide support for enumerated types
• Enhanced for loops, which allow developers to iterate over collections and arrays without using iterators or index variables
• varargs, which allow multiple arguments to be passed as parameters to methods
• annotations, which allow developers to associate additional information (metadata) with classes interfaces, methods, and fields

As pointed out earlier, annotations will make it possible to meet goals, such as drastically reducing the need for J2EE technology-based application developers to write deployment descriptors. Tools will be able to build deployment descriptors based on annotations (and any deployment descriptors optionally provided by deployers). Ease of development will show up in fewer and simpler lines of code. This is not only true for enterprise beans, but for perhaps more pedestrian things such as database queries. Imagine annotations being leveraged to simplify SQL query creation.

Hamilton said that language changes will continue to be made in the Mustang and Dolphin releases, that is, with careful thought and review.

Monitoring and management is another key area of emphasis. Hamilton said that "as people are deploying very large applications, they need to be able to track what's going on inside the application and find out what's happening at the JVM level and at the application level." To meet this need, a number of APIs have been added to monitor things at the VM level. In addition, Java Management Extensions (JMX), which has been a part of the J2EE platform, is now incorporated into the J2SE technology core. The JMX API allows developers to publish management agents ("mBeans") that can be used to monitor and manage applications. The platform also includes tools that make use of these monitoring and management facilities. One of these is a simple GUI-based tool called jconsole that can be used to monitor the VM. It also provides a generic API that can be used to monitor mBeans.

The desktop continues to be an important component of the Java platform. This is evidenced by performance improvements such as faster startup. It's also evidenced by some new and enhanced look and feels. One of these advances the old standard Java technology look and feel called Metal. Hamilton called the new L&F, named Ocean, a more gentle and less intrusive theme than Metal. Some other L&F changes include an enhanced Gnome GTK and an enhanced Aqua L&F for Mac users.

There are a number of other "forward-looking" ideas that are being worked on regarding the Java technology desktop. Two of these efforts are the aptly named JDesktop (JDIC), which provides components for desktop integration, and Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC), which provides high-level, data-aware components. Hamilton called on Sun engineer, Chet Haase, to demonstrate an application that takes advantage of JDIC. Among other things he showed, Haase demonstrated some of the cool navigation assists that JDIC offers. Significantly, the demo ran on Microsoft's upcoming OS release, Longhorn.

Hamilton noted that Tiger enhances some of the core J2SE XML support. This includes support for DOM Level 3, W3C Schema, XPath, an upgraded XSLT engine, and JAXP 1.3. Support for web services will be folded into J2SE in Mustang and Dolphin. This incudes support for JAX-RPC 2.0 client, JAXB 2.0 data binding, lightweight JAX-RPC services, XML encryption, and XML digital signatures.

Hamilton ended the presentation with a call to action. He encouraged the audience to:

• Take advantage of the massive deployment already happening with J2ME and MIDP technologies.
• Try out the Beta 2 release of Tiger. "Let us know of any urgent issues. Get ready for the full release in the fall."
• Get the J2EE 1.4 SDK, which is available now and supports production deployment.
• Participate in the JCP and public reviews for Mustang, Dolphin, and J2EE 5.0.

The "bottom line" is that a lot of good stuff is coming very soon, and some really cool stuff is coming later. So be active, try the new stuff out, and give feedback.

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