Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

J2SE Archives

BeanShell JSR - yeah!

Pat has filed a JSR to standarize BeanShell. Ask any lisp (or smalltalk or ... even just plain emacs elisp) developer - interpreters are really really handy to have around, even when you also have a compiler. Standarizing BeanShell should also help it continue to make an impact in the education community.

Welcome to the JCP, Pat! Hope you enjoy it.

JWSDP 1.4 is out!

• FCS implementation of JAX-RPC 1.1 with substantial performance improvements and implementing WS-I BP 1.1 and WS-I's Attachment Profile 1.0.
• FCS implementation of JAXB with substantial performance improvements.
• FCS JAXP 1.2, with new renamed packages, and with XSLTC as default transformation engine.
• EA support for OASIS's WS Security.
• EA support of JSR 105, implementing XML Digital Signature.
• Tested with several containers: Sun's App Server 8.0 PE (this the same as the free J2EE 1.4 SDK), Sun's Web Server 6.1, and Tomcat 5.0

A longer list is at Sun's web site, but below are some comments on this one.

In Sun's parlance, FCS stands for "first customer shipment", and means the component is production ready. In the case of the JWSDP, the license for FCS components allows deployment, but they are not supported - the supported versions will show up when bundled in later releases of Sun's products. EA stands for "early access" and indicates the component is useful for development but there may still be changes in the component, including the API!, before it becomes FCS quality.

JWSDP 1.4 has a number of substantial performance improvements. On the JAXB front, the biggest improvements were on marshalling and unmarshalling: when measured using an internal microbenchmarks we saw about 2x improvement; much of this thanks to direct feedback from the weekly builds at the JAXB project at java.net. I don't have specifics handy on the JAX-RPC improvements but they are key contributors to the recently published results on a macrobenchmark analysis comparing J2EE and .NET on WS and XML. XSLTC is, of course, the XSLT compiler that started as Sun experimental work, was then donated to Apache and is now in full product-ready mode (it is bundled in Tiger!); we see between 2.5x to 11x improvements in performance when compared with Xalan classic- although this depends on whether you apply the stylesheet only once, or several times. The usual disclaimer applies: although the numbers we quote are our best understanding of the real situation, your performance may vary... (there are lies, dammed lies, and benchmarks :-)).

The WS-I's Attachment Profile 1.0 is the MIME-based spec from WS-I that describes how to send attachments in WS messages. Attachments are critical to practical applications of WS and I believe that JWSDP is the first FCS-quality implementation of this standard.

The other major change on JAXP, besides the change of the default transformer (Xalan classic is still there, just not the default), is that the packages got renamed. This is so that you don't have to do classpath magic (which too often leads you into trouble) if you want to use at the same time the new JAXP classes and some other version of Xerces or Xalan.

I could also talk more about the JDBC RowSet Implementations 1.0 JWSDP 1.4 Co-Bundle, which provides a set of tools, documentation, samples and tutorial for developers who want to use JDBC RowSets with Web Services, but I'll talk more about that in another blog.

Finally, I just noticed that Marc also posted a blog on the JWSDP; Marc is a key participant at WS-I, among many other things, so he is your man in that area of the JWSDP!

Tiger Snapshots: bringing early feedback into the release cycle...

The intention of the snapshots are to get early feedback into the final stages of releasing Tiger. This approach has proven very successful in many communities - it is particularly common in the open source community - and I am particularly happy that Sun is embracing it in a number of product families. From my engineering perspective, it is nice to see this tendency: it can only lead to improved quality in the products.

Here are some other "early access" releases from Sun that I am aware of:

• Tiger snapshots
• Solaris express
• NetBeans Development Downloads
• Weekly builds for JAX-RCP and JAXB.

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