DraK's Klog

Some exiting news came out of a interview with Robert Brewin by ONJava.com. He mentions that modularization of the JRE will become a priority and will target Java 7.

This could change Java's distribution model to make it more Flash like.

Some mention that Sun has only recently understood the need to change Java's distribution model but this is not true, modularizing Java has been in the air for a long time, but this is a tremendous task, a lot of parts of Java are tighly coupled ... thus seperating them is very difficult. Using Dependency Structure Matrices here might help a lot

Sun seems to have felt the urge for doing this move right now because of the pressure of Microsoft and Adobe. In particular, Flash distribution model is transparent and seemless, you can be confident that your users have a pretty recent version of the flash engine on their browser, and if they don't, updating is a breeze. Only corporate users might have more difficulties though.

With the move to an Open Source license and many people wanting to see java modularized, maybe Sun is expecting some help from the community with this huge task.

The modularization of Java will definitely be one the biggest features of the forthcoming Java releases.

Let's hope that this feature will come true at last.