What's Brewing With Java

BBj is built on Java Technology. In this issue, BASIS Director of Marketing Greg Grisham presents a few of the latest enhancements of Sun's Java Runtime Environment 1.4.1.

Sun just released the 1.4.1 JVM. As always, there are a number of fixes and enhancements, and this column denotes some particular points of interest to the Business BASIC developer.

What is most significant is that Sun continues to release powerful, dynamic enhancements to an already exciting language.

Here are just some of the enhancements to 1.4.1:

	There are developer releases for the Itanium-64 environment. It is important to note that these are pre-releases, but we see this as a strong indication of how rapidly Linux is growing. It should also be noted that the 32-bit JVM will not work on the Itanium machines.
	Java Web Start 1.2 is included, both in the JDK, as well as the JRE. The most common question we get at BASIS is how to launch a BBj application inside a browser. The next most common question is how to launch directly from the desktop, from an icon. Java Web Start allows for an icon-launch of a web-based application without the screen baggage of the browser. This is becoming quite popular in extranet application design.
	There are a few command line switches that alter the garbage collection methodology (specifically, concurrent garbage collection), signifying Sun's commitment to improving performance.
	At the moment, each of these new flags is non-standard, as indicated by the fact that they begin with -X, which means that they are subject to change without notice. It should be noted that in our preliminary tests, our engineers report that utilizing these flags did not produce any significant performance improvements just yet. But this will definitely be an area to watch. The javadocs received a number of fixes. BASIS uses and will continue to use some of the javadocs functionality with our online documentation, so we are always pleased to see it improved and maintained.
	The Java Naming and Directory InterfaceTM underwent a number of enhancements. One of the more interesting aspects is that the DNS service provider now supports automatic discovery of DNS servers. For example, with 1.4.1, the DNS provider will attempt to determine and use the server(s) configured specifically for the underlying platform (like Linux and Solaris).
	These are just a few of the enhancements found in the 1.4.1 JVM. Keep an eye on this column for the latest news about this development environment.
	For more information on the JVM 1.4.1 go to