1.9. A Java Road MapWith everything that's going on, it's hard to keep track of what's available now, what's promised, and what has been around for some time. The following sections comprise a road map that imposes some order on Java's past, present, and future. 1.9.1. The Past: Java 1.0-Java 1.4Java 1.0 provided the basic framework for Java development: the language itself plus packages that let you write applets and simple applications. Although 1.0 is officially obsolete, there are still a lot of applets in existence that conform to its API. Java 1.1 superseded 1.0, incorporating major improvements in the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) package (Java's original GUI facility), a new event pattern, new language facilities such as reflection and inner classes, and many other critical features. Java 1.1 is the version that was supported natively by most versions of Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer for many years. For various political reasons, the browser world was frozen in this condition for a long time. This version of Java is still considered a sort of baseline for applets, although even this will fall away as Microsoft drops support for Java in their platforms. Java 1.2, dubbed "Java 2" by Sun, was a major release in December 1998. It provided many improvements and additions, mainly in terms of the set of APIs that were bundled into the standard distributions. The most notable additions were the inclusion of the Swing GUI package as a core API and a new, full-fledged 2D drawing API. Swing is Java's advanced user interface toolkit with capabilities far exceeding the old AWT's. (Swing, AWT, and some other packages have been variously called the JFC, or Java Foundation Classes.) Java 1.2 also added a proper Collections API to Java. Java 1.3, released in early 2000, added minor features but was primarily focused on performance. With Version 1.3, Java got significantly faster on many platforms and Swing received many bug fixes. In this timeframe, Java enterprise APIs such as Servlets and Enterprise JavaBeans also matured. Java 1.4, released in 2002, integrated a major new set of APIs and many long-awaited features. This included language assertions, regular expressions, preferences and logging APIs, a new I/O system for high-volume applications, standard support for XML, fundamental improvements in AWT and Swing, and a greatly matured Java Servlets API for web applications. 1.9.2. The Present: Java 5.0This book includes all the latest and greatest improvements through the final release of Java 5.0. This release provides many important and long-awaited language syntax enhancements including generics, typesafe enumerations, the enhanced for-loop, variable argument lists, static imports, autoboxing and unboxing of primitives, as well as advanced metadata on classes. A new concurrency API provides powerful threading capabilities and APIs for formatted printing and parsing similar to those in C have been added. RMI has also been overhauled to eliminate the need for compiled stubs and skeletons. There are also major additions in the standard XML APIs. Here's a brief overview of the most important features of the current core Java API:
The following "standard extension" APIs aren't necessarily part of the core Java distribution; you may have to download them separately:
In this book, we'll try to give you a taste of as many features as possible; unfortunately for us (but fortunately for Java software developers), the Java environment has become so rich that it's impossible to cover everything in a single book. 1.9.3. The FutureJava shows no signs of slowing down and there are many areas where the growth of new technologies is now synonymous with the growth of the Java implementations of those technologies. This is especially true in the areas of web services, web application frameworks, and XML tools. Java continues to expand its role in web-based and server-side enterprise applications. What's old is also new again, and client-side Java is gaining momentum as well. There are now more desktop Java applications being used on a daily basis than ever before. The area of small devices continues to be a rich one for Java. The Java "Java 2 Micro Edition" or J2ME is a subset of Java designed to fit on devices with limited capabilities. The reference platform for the J2ME architecture is the Palm PDA. Java is also now shipping in many cell phones, allowing downloadable applications and media. Probably the most exciting areas of change in Java today are found in the trend toward lighter weight, simpler frameworks for business and the integration of the Java platform with dynamic languages for scripting web pages and extensions. There is much more interesting work to come. 1.9.4. AvailabilityYou have several choices for Java development environments and runtime systems. Sun's Java development kit (JDK) is available for Windows and Linux and ships as standard equipment with Mac OS X and Solaris. Visit Sun's Java web site at http://java.sun.com for more information about obtaining the latest JDK (Version 5.0 is included on the accompanying CD-ROM; view CD content online at http://examples.oreilly.com/learnjava3/CD-ROM/). There are also Java ports for other platforms, including NetWare, HP-UX, OSF/1 (including Digital Unix), Silicon Graphics's IRIX, and various IBM operating systems (including AIX, OS/2, OS/390, and OS/400). There are also a whole array of popular Java Integrated Development Environments. We'll discuss two in this book: IBM's Eclipse (http://eclipse.org) and the Sun-backed NetBeans IDE (http://netbeans.org). These all-in-one development environments let you write, test, and package software with advanced tools at your fingertips. As for Java applets in web browsers, the world is generally too muddled to catalog specific versions of Java available on specific platforms. The answer, as we'll discuss later in this book, is to use the Java Plug-in in your pages, which adds up-to-date Java support for all browsers. With that said, the latest versions of the Netscape, FireFox, and Safari browsers generally do come with up-to-date Java runtimes. It is mainly Microsoft Internet Explorer that is the outlier. |