Java J2se 1.4 Core Platform Update

Synopsis

This book provides a quick assessment of the upgrades included in the J2SE 1.4 release, to give a developer familiar with Java in its 1.2 and 1.3 incarnations a rapid, one-stop shop to upgrade to the new standard. It provides really strong, concrete examples of the new technologies in action, so that readers can go away and immediately apply the new capabilities of J2SE 1.4 in their programming.

J2SE 1.4 marks the most significant upgrade so far to the Java 2 platform, standard edition. There are some major new APIs introduced (a new I/O framework, XML support, security, logging, preferences, regular expressions), some upgrades to old favourites (JDBC 3.0, Swing, collections), and for the first time since the introduction of Java 2, a language change. There are also some interesting developments in the platform's capabilities as a rich client development environment, which will be increasingly important in the upcoming world of web services.

Author Biography: James Hart is a writer, programmer, and Macintosh enthusiast, employed as a Technical Architect at Wrox, where he is paid to play with new technology until either he breaks it, or it breaks him. As well as writing about J2SE 1.4 for this book, he has also written about programming Java for Mac OS X, and is the author of several chapters on Java XML web services.