Jean Elliot, Director of Product Marketing for the Java SE Platform at Sun, was interviewed to talk about where Java SE is now and where it is going. They discussed the current Java SE roadmap, with Java SE 6 due in December and Java SE 7 in 2008. Other topics included open sourcing Java SE and the end-of-life of Java SE 1.3.1.
Java SE 6 is scheduled for release in early December. Sun's support policy is to support two versions back. Therefore, support of Java 1.3.1 will end with the release. Sun is offering a migration guide to help those who are still on Java 1.3.1. Similarly, with Java SE 7 due out in 2008, Sun's policy says that will EOL Java SE 1.4. Weekly snapshots of these releases have been going up on java.net.
Jean goes on to mention the Netbeans 5.5 release, which InfoQ covered yesterday, as well as that Sun's entire implementation of Java SE 6 will be open sourced. She goes on to mention the Real-Time and EmbeddedJava then gives an overview of the state of the JCP Program.