Sun Microsystems Inc and its partners have been talking about JMAPI, its Java management APIs for a couple of years or more now. But just what were they talking of? It transpires that Sun is planning to form an ‘expert group’ to develop additional Java APIs around JMAPI. No universal Java management foundation exists yet, it says, the previous JMAPI draft [0.8] has not reached the specification stage. Moreover there is no commercial product based on the draft available on the market today. BullSoft, Computer Associates, Exide Electronics, Jyra Research, Lumos, Tibco and Tivoli have all endorsed its proposed JMAPI effort. Sun says it is sifting through a large volume of requests from third parties who want to start expert groups, including extensions for source-code testing.