Java SE Roadmaps, John Pampuch

John Pampuch, Director of Java SE Software engineering outlined some of his team's activities. Here are a few of his comments, summarized of course:

• Name simplification. The Java product names have been changing. The new names are simpler. In summary, Sun will remove the "2" from all names. J2SE will be Java SE, J2ME becomes Java ME, and J2EE will become Java EE.
• Community. All new APIs will go through the community process. The community will lead and drive Java features now and in the future.
• There have been more than 100,000,000 downloads of the J2SE 5.0.
• Looking for 5.1 release. Don't bother; it isn't going to happen. The next major release is 6.0, but there will be 5.0 updates
• The timeline for feature releases will be 18-24 months. Intermediate releases will be bug fix updates.

Some of his Mustang themes:

• compatibility, stability, quality
• diagnosibility, monitoring & mgmnt
• xml & web services
• ease of development
• the desktop. The desktop is critical to Java's success. Expect lots of GUI upgrades, lcd font support, a system tray api, and graphics pipeline boosts using OpenGL and DIrectX

One of the things I noticed is that the keynote slides mention that Sun still wants contributions from the community in the form of bug fixes and features. However, I think it's fair to say that features are frozen. That is, new features are not being introduced into Mustang at this time. Although I don't speak for Sun, my conversations with key engineers on the project seems to confirm this. If you have a new feature idea, don't be surprised if your contribution lies dormant until the next release, Dolphin.

Speaking of Dolphin (Java SE 7), Mr. Pampuch said that the following features are under consideration:

• direct xml support
• friends for cross package refs
• method references
• JVM bytecodes for dynamic languages
• beanshell scripting language
• new io apis

Mark Hapner, J2EE development

Some of his comments:

• There's a big move towards Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) in Java EE.
• Annotations will be used extensively, and one of the biggest results is that deployment descriptors disappear.
• Java EE 5 has simplified web services support.
• EJB development is simplified
• There's a new persistence API.

You can expect this new Java EE 5 technology as a beta in Q4 2005. Finally, in Q1 2006 you can expect the final product.

Glassfish is an open source implementation of all Java EE standards. Mr. Hapner urged everyone to get involved. Start at the Glassfish Project Homepage.