Future Directions - Java

At Java One this year, James Gosling announced project Jakarta, an Apache working group working on a 100% Pure Java Servlet and JavaServer Page implementation to be used in the Apache web server. As of this writing, developers are still waiting for the release of Sun's JavaServer Web Development Kit source code. This promises to be an exciting development for Apache Jserv, as future releases can (and hopefully) coincide with the current JSDK specification.

Furthermore, the initial public release of the next version of the Servlet specification, 2.2, is also available. Aside from some relatively minor API changes and improvements, the new specifications introduces two new concepts. First, there is the "Web Application" concept. A web application is all the resources - servlets, jsp pages, images, classes, html pages and other resources that can be bundled - which can be packaged an run in servlet engines from different vendors. The next concept is a natural extension of the "Web Application" idea, the "Web Application Archive." Similar in concept to the jar files, all the resources associated in a web application would be bundled and zipped up in to a single file. Ideally, these ".war" (Web ARchive) could be distributed and easily plugged into servlet compliant web servers, greatly easing the integration process.