Fending off reports that Java doesn’t jive with the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista OS, Sun Microsystems is saying, Don’t
worry, Java Standard Edition 6 will get along with Vista just fine. Java SE 6 is due in November; Vista will be out early
in 2007.
“There were various areas where Vista had changed substantially [from] Windows XP that we needed to account for,” said Chet
Haase, architect for the Java desktop client group at Sun. One of the more visible issues was with the Vista Aero Glass desktop
manager, which provides a translucent graphical effect. The way Microsoft used graphics subsystems clashed with Java. So Java
engineers performed a work-around.
“Some folks have noticed that when they run Java applets in the browser, that Aero and desktop composition would get disabled,”
Greg Schechter, software architect for the Windows Presentation Foundation at Microsoft, wrote in a recent blog.
Sun has since addressed the issue, which was attributed to Java locking the primary buffer, denying Desktop Windows Manager
access to the resources needed to draw the desktop, Schechter wrote.
Versions of Java prior to the eighth update of Java SE 5.0 will function with Vista, but they disable the Desktop Windows
Manager.
Java SE 6 has received most of Sun’s attention during the Vista beta release time frame, and it is where most of the fixes
to the known problems reside, Sun’s Haase wrote in a recent blog.
“We encourage the breadth of the developer ecosystem to target the world’s leading development platform and are glad that
the Java community sees the advantages of running applets on Windows Vista,” said Jaye Roxe, Visual Studio group product manager
at Microsoft.
Other highlights of Java SE 6 include the ability to mix JavaScript with Java, more desktop APIs, and security enhancements.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
