Out with the Old, in with the New at JavaOne - Page 2

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Sun also plans to extend EE 6 by adding support for third-party libraries and frameworks. "We want to make it a lot simpler to use these frameworks," said Chinnici. "There are a lot of open source libraries but it's not easy to use them. We want to put standard APIs and third party extensions on the same footing so they don't look very different in an application."

The next client software, Java SE 7

Danny Coward then discussed Java SE 7, the next version of the client software, due in 2009. Before it's released, Sun plans to issue two updates to the Java Runtime Environment, a Performance release and a Consumer release. Coward said the Performance release was showing incredible speeds and would load much faster than Java has in the past, one of the complaints about the platform.

On to SE 7, he said that like EE 6, modularity would be one of the key features of SE 7, along with multiple language support and greater code reuse. Java SE 7 will support OSGi frameworks and Bundles, so apps written now with OSGi support will seamlessly work with SE 7 when it ships.

SE 7's virtual machine is opening up in a new way. It will support the execution of more than 200 languages, such as Ruby, Python, Perl and many other dynamic languages used by Web developers. "Our past attitude was that there was only one language, Java," said Coward. "But other people have recognized the 13 years of hard work on the Java Runtime's scalability."

So Sun is removing dependencies in the JVM, so that other languages than just Java can use the JVM Runtime to get a fast, scalable application.