New Developments
This edition of Learning Java is actually the sixth edition—updated and retitled—of our original, popular Exploring Java. With each edition, we’ve taken great care not only to add new material covering additional features, but to thoroughly revise and update the existing content to synthesize the coverage and add years of real-world perspective and experience to these pages.
One noticeable change in recent editions is that we’ve deemphasized the use of applets, reflecting their diminished role in recent years in creating interactive web pages. In contrast, we’ve greatly expanded our coverage of Java web applications, web services, and XML, which are now mature technologies.
We cover all of the important features of the latest release of Java, officially called Java Standard Edition (SE) 7, JDK 1.7. Sun (Java’s keeper before Oracle) has changed the naming scheme many times over the years. Sun coined the term Java 2 to cover the major new features introduced in Java version 1.2 and dropped the term JDK in favor of SDK. With the sixth release, Sun skipped from Java version 1.4 to Java 5.0, but reprieved the term JDK and kept its numbering convention there. After that, we had Java 6 and now we reach Java 7.
This release of Java reflects a mature language with relatively few syntactic changes but significant updates to APIs and libraries. We’ve tried to capture these new features and update every example in this book to reflect not only the current Java practice, but style ...
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