Wednesday, 21 June 2006

Java 6 Mustang Beta 2 Rolled Out

Sun Microsystems has unveiled the second beta version of its Java Platform, Standard Edition, codenamed Mustang. Java SE 6 Beta2 is touted as the first ‘feature complete’ version of Sun’s next major release of the Java SE platform.

Key features of Java SE 6 include:

• New Security features and enhancements: Native platform GSS/Kerberos integration, Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) login module that employs LDAP authentication, New Smart Card I/O API
  
  
• Integrated Web Services: New API for XML digital signature services for secure web services, New Client and Core Java Architecture for XML-Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 APIs, New support for Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0
  
  
• Enhanced Management & Serviceability: Improved JMX Monitoring API, Runtime Support for dTrace (Solaris 10 and future Solaris OS releases only), New custom deployment facilities
  
  
• Increased Developer Productivity: Improved memory usage analysis and leak detection, significant library improvements, Improvements to the Java Platform Debug Architecture (JPDA) & JVM Tool Interface
  
  
• Improved User Experience: Look and feel updates to better match underlying platforms, improved desktop performance and integration, Enhanced internationalization support, Danny Coward, Java SE Platform lead and Mark Reinhold, Java SE Chief Engineer say that Java SE 6 is right on track for moving along to its Fall general release. They have listed out the top ten things a developer must know about Mustang. Key points from the list include:
  
  
• Web Services: All developers are said to get first-class support for writing XML web service client applications. You can expose your APIs as .NET interoperable web services with a simple annotation. If handling XML directly is what you’re looking for, Mustang adds new parsing and XML to Java object-mapping APIs, previously only available in Java EE platform implementations or the Java Web Services Pack.
  
  
• Scripting: You can mix in JavaScript technology with your Java technology source code, useful for prototyping and when you have teams with a variety of skill sets. More advanced developers can plug in their own scripting engines and mix their favorite scripting language in with Java code as they see fit.
  
  
• Database: The final Mustang development kit – though not the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – will co-bundle the all-Java JDBC database, Java DB based on Apache Derby. Developers will get the updated JDBC 4.0, a well-used API that focuses on ease of use. It also contains many feature additions like special support for XML as an SQL datatype and better integration of Binary Large OBjects (BLOBs) and Character Large OBjects (CLOBs) into the APIs.
  
  
• More desktop APIs: GUI developers will get various new tricks to play with, such as the newly incorporated SwingWorker utility to help with threading in GUI apps, JTable sorting and filtering, and a new facility for quick splash screens.
  
  
• Monitoring and Management: "The really big deal here is that you don't need do anything special to the startup to be able to attach on demand with any of the monitoring and management tools in the Java SE platform. Mustang adds yet more diagnostic information, and we co-bundled the infamous memory-heap analysis tool Jhat for forensic explorations of those core dumps," Danny says.

Mark also provides a table detailing the approved features of Java SE 6, sorted by area, feature and component name.

Java SE Development Kit Beta 2 includes the JVM technology and is available for download at the official website