Please direct your comments on this JSR to: jsr-059-comments@sun.com. Remember to identify the JSR you are commenting on somewhere in the subject of your e-mail (this is JSR-000059).

JSR-000059 J2SE Merlin Release Contents

Section 1. Identification

Submitting Participant: Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Name of Contact Person: Graham Hamilton

E-Mail Address: merlin-jsr@eng.sun.com

Telephone Number: +1 408 863 3000

It is expected the expert group will include experts from:

• OS platform vendors
• tool vendors
• application vendors
• enterprise customers
• end developers

Section 2: Request

2.1 Please describe the proposed Specification:

This JSR is to develop a specification for the feature and API set for the next update release of Java 2 Standard Edition, code named "Merlin", targeted to ship in 2001. Merlin is one of a series of update releases to J2SE. The intention is to ship update releases on a regular 12-18 month cycle, with each update release including a combination of quality improvements and a small amount of new features.

This JSR will not itself define any new APIs, rather it will enumerate APIs defined in other JSRs or through the JCP maintenance process.

It is expected that most of the effort in the Merlin release will be around product quality (bug fixing) and product performance with only a relatively small amount of new features and new APIs.

The JSR expert group will define a specification consisting of a target feature and API set for Merlin. This target list will be further refined during participant review and public review and will become the target feature set for the Merlin release. The goal is that the Merlin release will include this full target set, but depending on implementation and API design schedules some items may be deferred to a later release if they are unable to make the release schedule for Merlin. The final specification will reflect the final Merlin deliverables.

2.2 What is the target Java platform? (i.e., desktop, server, personal, embedded, card, etc.)

This specification defines the next release of the J2SE Platform.

2.3 What need of the Java community will be addressed by the proposed specification?

It is anticipated that the Merlin release will be mainly targeted at the following major themes:

• Reliability
• Serviceability
• Scalability
• Performance
• Deployment

The Merlin release will be fully compatible with earlier J2SE releases.

Section 3: Contributions

Various existing JSR API initiatives will be evaluated as potential candidates for Merlin. Amongst the possible candidates for evaluation are:

• JSR-005 XML Parsing
• JSR-010 Preferences API
• JSR-031 XML Data Binding
• JSR-041 A Simple Assertion Facility
• JSR-047 Logging API
• JSR-051 New IO APIs
• JSR-054 JDBC 3.0
• JSR-055 Certificate Path API
• JSR-056 Network Launching API
• JSR-057 Long Term Persistence for JavaBeans