1999

• NetBeans IDE acquired by Sun.

• Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.2

  • Servlets
  • JavaServer Pages
  • RMI & CORBA
  • Messaging & mail
  • JavaBeans support in JDBC

2000

• Java 2 Standard Edition 1.3

  • HotSpot JVM
  • CORBA support
  • JNDI
  • Java Sound API

• NetBeans IDE open-sourced.

2001

• Sun, Microsoft settle lawsuit.

  • Java features in J++ frozen.
  • Releases of J++ required to pass standard Java compatibility tests.
  • Schedule set for discontinuing Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (MSJVM).

• Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.3

  • Connector
  • Authentication/authorization
  • XML processing

• Eclipse IDE 1.0

2002

• Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4

  • assert
  • Nested exceptions
  • Regular expressions
  • Image I/O API
  • XML & XSLT processing API (JAXP)
  • Security & cryptography extensions
  • Java Web Start (JWS)

2003

• Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4

  • Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)
  • Management API
  • XML RPC

2004

• After 2 years of internal development at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Scala has its first public release. Scala is a JVM-based language, compiling to Java bytecode that is interoperable with bytecode produced by the Java compiler; the syntax differs significantly from that of Java, with the aim of strongly encouraging a functional programming style.

• Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0 (1.5)

  • enum
  • Generics
  • Annotations
  • Autoboxing/unboxing
  • Varargs
  • Enhanced for
  • import static
  • Concurrency utility package

• Groovy scripting language proposed (via the JCP) as an addition to the JDK. The proposal was not acted on in any significant way, and development of Groovy continued outside of the JCP.

2006

• Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) 5

  • JavaServer Faces (JSF)
  • JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL)
  • Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS)
  • Java Transaction API (JTA)
  • Java Persistent API (JPA)
  • Annotations

• Java Standard Edition (JSE) 6 (1.6)

  • Performance improvements
  • Enhanced scripting language support
  • Compiler API
  • XML binding and web service APIs
  • Compiler-level custom annotations
  • Apache Derby DB (as JavaDB)
  • Rhino JavaScript engine (by Mozilla)

• Sun announces open-sourcing plan for Java.