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J2SE 1.5, which is now in its first beta release, with the final beta release due in early fall, focuses on developer productivity and ease of use, Hamilton said. "The big challenge is to improve simplicity," he said. "We have to shift the focus from power to simplicity. … And knowing the vendors involved with Java, I dont think were going to lose the power." Indeed, a key effort of the ease-of-development strategy is to "grow the market of developers," he said. The most important change in J2SE 1.5 is annotations, Hamilton said. Annotations allow for simpler declarative programming and will be used by tools and libraries, he said. J2SE 1.5 features an Annotation Processor Tool, also known as Apt, which discovers and runs annotation processors. "Apt didnt make it into Beta 1, but it will be in Beta 2," Hamilton said. "Its getting fairly late in the lifetime of Tiger, but we are interested in your feedback." Annotation processors can look at annotations in a source or class and generate new Java files, class files or descriptors, or XML files, but they cant modify Java language semantics or generate new class files or descriptors. Check out eWEEKs Developer & Web Services Center at http://developer.eweek.com for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.
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