At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco on Monday, Sun unveiled some of the features that are due to appear in the next two versions of Java. The next release of Java, codenamed Mustang, is due to be released in the third quarter of 2006, and will be followed by the Dolphin release in the first quarter of 2008.
Sun is also changing the naming convention of Java, which means that Mustang will be known as Java Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6), rather than J2SE 6.0. Mark Reinhold, the chief engineer for Java Standard Edition, explained that Sun is getting rid of the two as "it doesn't mean much any more" and is omitting the ".0" due to a change in its release cycle.
In the past, Sun released major versions of Java every two to three years and in between each version released a number of "maintenance releases" that included lots of bug fixes, and "update releases" that included a few bug fixes, said Reinhold. The maintenance releases were given the major version number, appended with ".1".
Starting with Tiger, the current version of Java, Sun will stop shipping maintenance releases and will ship feature releases more frequently — every 18 months to two years. This new release cycle will allow Java to evolve more quickly and prevent it from falling behind .NET, according to Reinhold. "By shipping feature releases more frequently we can maintain a faster, more responsive platform. This is important to compete with .NET," he said.
The Java Community Process (JCP) group responsible for deciding changes to Mustang, agreed on 15 June that a number of new APIs will be included in this version, according to Mark Reinhold, the Chief Engineer for the Java Standard Edition. These new APIs, defined in Java Specification Requests (JSRs), include ease of development, XML and Web services features. As well as new APIs, Mustang will also include a number of smaller features, such as improved out of memory handling and classpath wildcards.
