The Release of the Tiger and Introduction of Mustang

Sun Microsystems, Inc., the creator and leading advocate of Java technology, today announced the general availability of Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE(tm)) 5.0.

The final release of tiger was announced by Graham Hamilton, Calvin Austin, Doug Lee, James Gosling, and Jeff Jackson. This is the largest java release the company has made since 1995.

J2SE 5.0 is derived from the work of 15 component Java Specification Requests (JSRs) encompassing advanced capabilities for the language and platform. There are nearly 160 expert members involved designing over 100 features that drive extensive developer benefits including ease of use, overall performance and scalability, system monitoring and management, and rich client desktop development. Easier to use with record breaking performance and quality, J2SE 5.0 is being heralded as the most significant upgrade to the Java platform and programming language in nearly a decade.

Six Major Themes

"J2SE 5.0 is delivering greatly improved developer productivity and outstanding quality by relying on the deep values of the Java language," said Graham Hamilton, vice president, Sun fellow and lead architect for the J2SE 5.0 release. "Working through 15 Java Community Process expert groups, the Java community has delivered the most significant update ever to the Java platform. It sets the stage for the next wave of network systems innovation." He went on to detail the six major themes behind J2SE 5.0:

1. Quality: As in past versions of the product, quality is the first priority.
2. Greater Performance and scalability: The new release includes performance improvements such as faster startup time, a smaller memory footprint, and JVM auto-tuning to drive greater overall application and development performance on J2SE 5.0 over previous versions.
3. Monitoring and management: A key focus for the new platform release, the Java Virtual Machine and Java technology-based applications can be monitored and managed with the built-in support for Java Management Extensions. This helps ensure your employees', customer's and partner's systems stay up and running longer. Support for SNMP-based enterprise management systems is also viable.
4. Rich client desktop: A new, more modern default Java technology-based application look and feel provides an up-to-date GUI for Java technology-based applications. J2SE 5.0 has full internationalization support and also features support for hardware acceleration via the OpenGL(R) API for Linux and Solaris(tm) operating systems.
5. Ease of development: Java language programmers can be more efficient and productive with new Java language features that enable faster and more secure coding. Generics, enumerated types, metadata and autoboxing of primitive types enable easier and faster coding.
6. Support for XML: Built in support for XML including a new transformation XML engine.

"In accord with the increasingly open Java Community Process policies and guidelines, several major components of J2SE 5.0 were conceived and led by members of the Java development community," said Doug Lea, professor at the State University of New York, Oswego. "All 15 component JSRs had plenty of community involvement, leading to more advice, feedback, review, testing and midcourse improvements than ever before in a major Java platform release. As specification lead for the Concurrency Utilities specification, it's great to see the results of all these component JSRs efficiently coordinated and available in J2SE."

Borland's Jbuilder 2005 is among the first Java development tools to fully support J2SE 5.0. and make this a reality.

Availability

The J2SE 5.0 platform and JRE are now available for download at http://www.java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp.