Over two years in the making, Sun Microsystems is due to release the latest version of its Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software Monday, placing particular emphasis on the application development platform"s support for other scripting languages. "Going multilingual is a big theme of this release," said Mark Reinhold, Sun"s chief engineer for Java SE.
Sun"s approach used to be that Java was the solution for all developers" problems, he said. But it has since become clear to Sun that developers want to use other languages in conjunction with Java to create hybrid applications. Sun has created a collection of scripting engines on its Web site, and Java SE 6 includes a preconfigured version of Mozilla"s open-source Rhino JavaScript engine.
"Java SE 6 is an extremely significant release for us," said Jean Elliott, Sun"s senior director of Java platform product marketing. She drew particular attention to community participation in the platform"s development. For the first time, hundreds of non-Sun developers had some input into the Java SE development process, beginning in September 2004 as Sun released Java SE 5. One area where developers influenced the platform was their request