Arriving late on the scene, Apple Computer Inc yesterday said it too will endorse Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java Foundation Classes set of reusable components, that actually are a combination of Sun’s Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), Netscape communications Corp’s Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) and some of IBM’s technology. Apple said it would endorse the JFC as a premier development environment and API platform for Mac OS and Rhapsody, but as there is already a Java run-time environment containing a Java virtual machine, we’re not sure that this really amounts to much more than back-slapping. Nobody was available at the company to elaborate further as they were all holed up at the company’s developers’ conference. The classes can be used to Java user interfaces with a consistent set of components, and have already been endorsed by Netscape, IBM as well as Sun. They are due to appear in the 1.2 cut of the Java Developer’s Kit (JDK), which is due around late summer. Apple is one of the famous five that have been going around for over a year now saying what a good thing Java, Corba and network computers are – the others being IBM, Sun, Netscape and Oracle. But recently Apple was left by the wayside somewhat, doubtless it had more important matters to deal with.
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