Package Naming Conventions

When you look at the contents of the J2SE API you will notice three general groups of packages. Those whose names begin with "java" are typically (but not always) older APIs that have been in existence since Java 1.1. Package names that begin with "javax" indicate more recent additions to the Java API, added in version 1.2 or later. The packages whose names begin with "org" deal with topics such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), naming contexts, and XML processing classes.

As the Java language has evolved, so has the Java API. An example of this can be found in the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) classes. The original JDBC classes, called the core JDBC API, were introduced in Java 1.1 and can be found in the java.sql package. Additional JDBC functionality was added in Java 1.2 by way of the javax.sql package. With J2SE version 1.4, the distinction between the "core" and "later" JDBC facilities is no longer made. The packages are still distinct but collectively they are referred to as the JDBC 3.0 API.