Graham Hamilton's Blog

"Evolving the Java Platform"

The kind folks at Software Development Times asked me to write an article on the future directions for the Java platform. This has now surfaced in their May 15th edition as Evolving the Java Platform.

This includes some thoughts on the planned directions for Mustang, Dolphin, and J2EE 5.0.

They also broke out a separate short article on Increasing Transparency: Project Peabody which discusses some of the things we are doing to simplify J2SE licensing and encourage community contributions into Mustang.

We'll be talking in more detail about all these topics (and a lot more) at JavaOne 2005, June 27-30 in San Francisco.

Comments

• the links do not work, hence the thoughts are invisible ;)

  Posted by: km105526 on May 17, 2005 at 08:21 PM

• I guess that's what happens when you increase the transparency ;)

  Posted by: osbald on May 18, 2005 at 02:25 AM

• "We’re interested in introducing direct support for XML into the Java language. Many Java developers work with XML, and we’re interested in finding ways of smoothing that integration."

  Does this have a JSR yet? Why just XML? If the Java language is to be extended to allow better integration with one other language, then why not many other languages? Many Java developers work with SQL, Javascript, Beanshell, Python, Jython, C, C++, C#, etc... In total, I wager, far more than work with XML.

  Posted by: coxcu on May 18, 2005 at 07:18 AM

• 
  Sorrly for the problem with the links.
  The target website had some problems but it seems to be back now.

         
         
         
         
  - Graham

  Posted by: kgh on May 18, 2005 at 07:52 AM

• 
  On XML in the Java language: We are still at the exploratory phase on this one, so there isn't a JSR (yet). Mark Reinhold will be talking about the current ideas during the "Evolving the Java Language" session at JavaOne.

  On other languages: Making the Java platform work well with other programming languages is also high on our list. That's why JSR 232 is going into Mustang and why we are looking at a new bytecode for dynamic languages in Dolphin. But XML as a data definition language is on a rather different axis to programming languages. It sems to be worth considering making it easier to support XML data within programming languages.

          
          
          
  - Graham

  Posted by: kgh on May 18, 2005 at 08:04 AM

• Would this be similar to E4X for JavaScript, such as the implementaion by the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine?
  That seems fairly clean, hopefully it won't involve any performance impacts...
  Other than that, in the roadmap, there's no mention of the "MVM", which (to me) seems a logical way to encourage the seemingly renewed interest in Java desktop applications.
  -Chris

  Posted by: chris_e_brown on May 18, 2005 at 08:17 AM

• Can you give us a brief about how the packaging and versioning for complex applications are going to be handled? Just current ideas that you have..

  Posted by: vhi on May 18, 2005 at 08:44 AM

• there are some thoughts on integrating xml into java like languages here:
           
  http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xml03/papers/06-02-01/06-02-01.pdf

  which are surely a good point of reference?

  using some of the ideas from JoinJava or its C# equivalent (polyphonic C# or C omega) would be very neat but thats probably post-dolphin?

  On the packaging ideas - would there by a JSR specifically for this? I've heard a lot of people with a lot of varying ideas about what is a good thing to do. Unlike other languages changes I've not seen a formal treatment of packaging concepts?

  asjf

  Posted by: asjf on May 18, 2005 at 11:26 AM

• I really doubt if supporting XML natively in the programming language is going to be benefitial to the majority of developers out there. In my experience, most of the developers work with XML from an external source such as file, n/w etc. Only a very few cases really have XML model hard-coded into the source code. Also, the idea of a declarative language like XML is to really separate data from behaviour, whereas here it encourages the opposite, intermixing data and behaviour in a procedural fashion. I cannot really see any benefits, as the resulting masala is hard to read and verbose.

  Posted by: vhi on May 18, 2005 at 11:42 AM

• Hi

  Is there any project to create automatic iterators in collections like C# 2.0 ?

  http://www.theserverside.net/articles/showarticle.tss?id=IteratorsWithC2
  

  Posted by: dreamtangerine on May 19, 2005 at 08:21 AM

• Somehow I feel maybe this might be starting with compatibility with all the languages, once upon a time every language use to use there own memory pointers and there own datastores, now slowly this underneath layer is going to change with XML, i.e. more data interchangable support ... and than all languages will be able to communicate with others, What is the real benefit?All beast can talk to each other and share there powers

  sp2p.net

  Posted by: heated_corgi on May 19, 2005 at 09:19 PM

• Hello,

  I would (from a design point of view) be very interested in your proposal of a concept for exposing package-private data to other packages. Since I have some ideas for that floating around in my mind I would be happy in participating in that discussion. What will be the right place for input?

  Posted by: rbirenheide on June 06, 2005 at 07:34 AM

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