Sun takes the covers off Mustang

Tags:
Dolphin,
JAR,
J2SE,
Jcp

Published: 29 Jun 2005 12:20 BST

JAX-WS 2.0 — JSR 224
The new version of this XML-Web services specification adds support for the latest W3C and WS-I standards and makes it easier for you to export something as a Web service. The earlier version of this specification, called JAX-RPC 1.0, required significant amounts of code to export something as a Web service, said Reinhold. With 2.0, much of this code can be replaced by using the annotation, @Webservice.

Evaluating disk space
Java.io.File will be updated to include methods to determine the size of disk partitions and the amount of free space on each partition. This feature will be useful for people who write installers, allowing them to find out if there is space for an application before starting the installation, said Reinhold.

Classpath wildcards
This will allow you to load all files in a directory rather than listing each file in the directory individually. The syntax for the wildcard will be a single asterisk. "This is something a lot of people have been wanting for a while," said Reinhold.

Improved out of memory handling
You will see a stack trace when an OutOfMemoryError is thrown, helping you find what caused the error.

In addition, some of the features that may appear in Dolphin include:

Improved JAR files — JSR 277
There are a number of problems with the current JAR file format that Sun accepts, including problems with sharing and versioning JAR files. "JAR file hell" may be fixed in Dolphin, said Reinhold.

Language-level support for XML
The difficulties of using DOM and SAX to handle XML could be a thing of the past in Dolphin, when Reinhold indicated that language-level support for XML may be added to Java.