Slimming Down Java
Protocol laid out for deletion of SE features
September 15, 2006 —
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After years of bloating with new features, Java SE may begin to slim down over the next few years. Thanks to some new guidelines added to JSR 270, the Java SE 6 proposal, the JCP can now move to discard older, lesser-used features of the platform.
First on the chopping block: javax.sound.midi. This musical-instrument support file is quite large and rarely used, and it may soon be removed entirely from the Java platform, according to the team working on JSR 270.
Mark Reinhold, Sun’s chief engineer for Java SE 6 platform and specification lead for JSR 270, wrote in his blog on the company Web site that, so far, MIDI support is the only thing scheduled for deletion, but that CORBA was also high on the potential assassination list.
However, he wrote, “it turns out that lots of existing client applications depend upon the RMI-IIOP protocol and it doesn’t appear possible to tease out RMI-IIOP from the rest of the CORBA APIs. Deciding to remove CORBA might be easier once the platform has a robust module system so that the CORBA packages can be downloaded as needed.” (RMI-IIOP stands for Remote Method Invocation over Internet Inter-Orb Protocol, and it’s used by developers to build distributed applications.)
Outside of the blogosphere, Reinhold quipped to SD Times that the Java platform, as a whole, was becoming unwieldy. “This has been in discussion in the JSR 270 expert group for many months. There was a general sense in the expert group that the platform is getting very large. We were all concerned about the size of the minimum Java runtime environment download,” said Reinhold.
The decision to remove MIDI support from Java Standard Edition marks the first time a feature has ever been removed from the language.
To do this, said Reinhold, the Java SE 6 JSR 270 team had to develop a method for submitting deletion proposals. Despite the creation of this process, however, he doesn’t see a massive shedding of features anytime soon.
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