As it announced late last year, Sun is bundling the Apache Derby embedded database into its Java Enterprise System. It has rebranded it Java DB.
As one of the first Java embedded databases, Derby was the descendant of Cloudscape, which was acquired by Informix and later, by IBM.
It’s been the embedded database at the heart of IBM’s Lotus Workplace collaboration suite, and its WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, which comes out of the Apache Geronimo project. And it’s also available as part of Sun’s portal and appservers.
Another new feature of Java SE 6 is GroupLayout, the GUI layout manager better known as Project Matisse. One of the more successful features of Sun’s NetBeans framework, Matisse provides a WYSIWYG environment for building user interfaces with the Swing controls.
Matisse was so popular that Genuitec, developer of the MyEclipse IDE, has decoupled Matisse so it can also generate the AWT controls used by Eclipse. However, the piece that’s going into Java SE 6 will support only development of the Swing controls, meaning that this feature of SE 6 is likely to be among the least popular.
In conjunction with the rollout of beta 2, Sun is also announcing that two of china’s biggest PC makers, Lenovo and Founder Technology Group, have both signed licensing agreements to ship the latest Java client run time (JRE) on consumer desktop and notebook PCs starting as early as the third quarter of this year.
With beta 2, Sun says that it is still on track for general availability release of Java SE 6 by the fall, which was the original plan.
