With the latest cut of the Java Development Kit 1.2, the third beta release, now up on Sun Microsystems Inc’s web site for immediate download, Sun detailed future releases of JDK and released the Enterprise JavaBeans 1.0 specification at JavaOne yesterday. The JavaBeans spec has gone through its public review and is now final. The final release of JDK 1.2 is due this summer. Before then, and due next month will be JDK 1.1.6, incorporating Symantec Corp’s Just-In-Time Compiler 3.0 into the Java Runtime for Microsoft Windows. The combination is expected to boost the performance of Java applications running on Microsoft Windows – particularly important since Microsoft announced its own Windows-optimized Java tools and libraries earlier this month (CI No 3,366). Sun’s benchmarking figures show JDK 1.1.6 coming out something like four times the performance of JDK 1.1 and nine times the performance of JDK 1.0.2. Sun is expecting further performance increases from the Java HotSpot virtual machine, which will run with JDK 1.2, and ships in the fall of this year. A public beta release is due out in the summer. The Swing Java Foundation Classes, the 1.1 release of which first appeared last month (CI No 3,358), will be extended with cross-platform drag and drop and the Java 2D API, and appear with JDK 1.2. That will also have a new security model, with an extension of the original sandbox to include permission-based access policies, the JavaBeans Component Model, Java Remote Invocation running on top of the Internet InterORB Protocol, the Java IDL for Corba, and internationalization support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean input methods. This week, Sun also announced the final release of InfoBus 1.1, a compact Java API intended to enable cooperating applets or JavaBeans components to exchange structured data. InfoBus is a Lotus Development Corp technology which Sun adopted at last year’s JavaOne event (CI No 3,136). It has now been 100% Java certified and is out immediately.
