Today Sun released Java Standard Edition 6. Although I haven’t had time to test-drive it the feature list looks promising. Amongst the new features the scripting language support (JSR 223) stands out. Next to a new framework and API for scripting languages they’ve integrated Mozillas’ Javascript engine (Rhino) into the platform.
I must say that the examples of the usage are a bit awkward; in the case of Javascript I’d probably used validation as an example … to make sure client- and serverside validations yield exactly identical results. Maybe something I need to have a look at when time permits!
Now we’ll just have to see how long it takes for the industry to upgrade… hopefully it will be less painful than the Java1.4 > Java(1.)5 upgrade.