An overview of what's in the new VM and what to expect from JavaSoft and others
With the release of JDK 1.1, JavaSoft ups the ante in core services available to developers. Development tool and browser vendors, however, are scrambling to bring the new services to their customers.
The new services break down into two groups. Core services join the ranks of java.io, java.util, java.net, and others, so you can expect them to be available in the Java runtime environment found on every conventional workstation. The rest of the new APIs are, at least for the moment, “standard extensions” whose class libraries you may need to package with your application because they may or may not be found on all VMs.
Beyond support for inner classes, reflection, serialization, internationalization, and AWT improvements, the core APIs now include:
- JavaBeans — a component framework
- Java Security — a framework for signing applets
- Java Enterprise APIs
- JDBC — database connectivity through a SQL interface
- Java RMI — remote method invocation
JavaSoft also has announced a flurry of APIs that will be rolled into later JDKs or released as standard extensions.
