Java News from Friday, September 23, 2005

Three years after the initial JSR, Oracle has also posted the first public review draft specification of JSR-198 A Standard Extension API for Integrated Development Environment . According to the draft,

There are a diverse set of IDE products that are designed from the ground up to be extensible platforms where third parties can plug-in new extensions that enhance the IDE with additional features. In general, the layer that integrates an extension to an IDE is only compatible with the integration API of that single IDE. If we examine the IDE integration layer that typical IDE platforms provide we can see that:

The Extension Software Development Kit (ESDK) proposed by this specification defines a standard application programming framework for extending IDEs written in Java with new functionality. It is designed to eliminate the need to write multiple versions of the integration layer that plugs-in the new functionality across different IDEs.

Where there are many areas of integration that could be addressed by this specification, for purposes of the first scope, viability, and time, this version of the ESDK covers integration points that allow extension writers to:

These integration points provide enough coverage to allow building realistic and useful extensions. Integration points not covered by this version of the specification will be addressed in future versions.

Comments are due by October 17.


Apple has posted a security update for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.2. Among other fixes, this plugs a hole in QuickTime for Java that allows an untrusted applet to "call arbitrary functions from system libraries." This affects QuickTime 6.5.2 and earlier.