Mark Reinhold's Blog

Mustang Component JSRs

The JSR 270 Expert Group recently decided upon the set of component JSRs that will appear in Mustang, a.k.a. Java SE 6. Here they are, grouped together by area:

There are a few differences between this set and the set originally proposed in JSR 270:

• JSR 173, the Streaming API for XML, was added; it's a prerequisite for both JAXB 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0.
• JSRs 181 (WS Metadata), and 250 (Common Annotations) were added; these are prerequisites for JAX-WS 2.0.
• There is no JSR for "JAXP.next"; instead a minor maintenance revision of JAXP will be proposed for Mustang.
• JSR 268, the Java Smart Card I/O API, was dropped. Platform implementors are of course free to deliver an implementation of this JSR alongside their Java SE 6 implementations, which is what Sun intends to do, but JSR 268 won't be a required part of the platform.

Mustang's final release is slated for the third quarter of 2006. A lot could change between now and then, but unless something truly surprising happens then these are the JSRs that will appear in Mustang.

Comments

• Dropping JSR 268 Smart Card API is rather disappointing. Are there any plans to include it in Dolphin?

  Posted by: tauronx on July 20, 2005 at 02:10 AM

• Where can I find information (examples) of how to use the scripting engine in Mustang?

  Posted by: carmello on July 20, 2005 at 07:57 AM

• Re. JSR 268: Whether it will be included in Dolphin will be up to the Dolphin EG. The consensus in the Mustang EG was that while smart cards are interesting they aren't yet widely enough used to justify adding an API to the core Java platform at this time. That would require that all Java SE implementors support it.

  As I said above, though, Sun's plan is to co-bundle an implementation of JSR 268 along with Sun's Mustang JRE, so from a practical perspective if you're using Sun's JRE then you'll find that JSR 268 is built in. Other implementors, however, might not include JSR 268; that's up to them.

  Posted by: mreinhold on July 20, 2005 at 09:21 AM

• Re. scripting engine in Mustang: JSR 270 won't require any particular scripting engine; JSR 223 just provides a common framework for plugging arbitrary scripting engines into the platform. Sun's JRE will include a JavaScript interpreter based on the Mozilla Rhino code; other implementors might include this interpreter, or others, or none at all.

  JSR 223 and the JavaScript interpreter were integrated into Mustang in build 40, so if you download the latest Mustang snapshot then you can play with it today. I don't think we've yet published any documentation on how to use it; I'll talk to the engineers involved and suggest that they blog about it.

  Posted by: mreinhold on July 20, 2005 at 09:22 AM

• And so another 10MB or so is added to the JDK, and another few hundred classes (at least) that almost noone will ever use are forced on people learning Java in the name of "ease of development" together with an even more convoluted language syntax. I'm starting to think I made the wrong decision to invest time and money in SCJP and SCJD certification and could better have spent it on learning C# or PL/1.

  Posted by: jwenting on July 21, 2005 at 01:05 AM

• shame to see JSR203 really isn't going to make it :( it would be great if someone in the know could give some detailed insight into what is going on with JSR203

  Posted by: asjf on July 21, 2005 at 05:27 AM

• Re. JSR 203: The NIO.2 JSR is slated for Dolphin (Java SE 7). Expect to see work on this JSR start up in the next few months.

  Posted by: mreinhold on July 21, 2005 at 08:14 AM

• why not drop away the deprecated api since JDK1.1 or 1.2 in Mustang release?It will make the language more simple and clear.

  Posted by: kidxml on August 16, 2005 at 06:13 PM

• Mark,

  I was wondering whether you could clarify something for me:

  I recently submitted a small enhancement (one class) as part of the Mustang Collaboration program (Peabody). I did not hear anything from anyone at Sun for over 6 weeks, then got an e-mail telling me that Mustang had already been 'frozen' and my fix would have to wait for Dolphin.

  I then remembered your blog.

  Can I clarify that the JSRs you list here (many of which are not final) are still under active development? Therefore, though Mustang is indeed 'frozen' from a 'what JSRs are we including' point of view, it is not frozen from a 'no more code now, we're only doing testing' standpoint?

  It seems extreme to code freeze Mustang almost a year away from release date? Or has there been a misunderstanding?

  Posted by: kennardconsulting on October 31, 2005 at 05:14 PM

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