Sun Microsystems Inc’s JavaSoft Inc unit made a clutch of minor announcements yesterday at Internet World in Los Angeles. The company is now shipping the JavaBeans Development Kit (BDK) 1.0 at it has the JavaBeans-to-ActiveX bridge available in beta. JavaBeans is the component-based development tool, and the bridge provides a link to Windows-based system so applications written using JavaBeans can run in Windows. JavaBeans application programming interfaces (APIs) have also been included in the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1, which also features 15 example Beans and a BeanBox test container to test Bean behavior. Both the BDK and bridge are free downloads at http://java.sun.com/beans. Separately, the HotJava browser 1.0 will ship March 24. It’s meant for system integrator and independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop customized browsers for clients. It’s targeted at things like network computer, personal digital assistant (PDA) and kiosk vendors, as it has a footprint of 2.5Mb, which is pretty big for these things, and runs in less than 1.5Mb RAM. The other thing JavaSoft announced yesterday was something called the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), which appears to be a kind of ‘JDK Lite’ – a compact solution for developers that is compatible with JDK. It meant for developers to bundle with their application while operating systems vendors get round to embedding JDK 1.1 into their OS.
