J2SE 5.0 or J2SE 1.5

Yesterdy I visited java.sun.com after a weeks gap to find a strange new creature on the products page. It was called Java Standard Edition 5.0, this new creature is something I have never heard of before.

There weren't any definitive article (one that could be easily found anyway) that described what exactly that they have done, So I am happily jumping into my own conclusion and here it is.

It appears that because of the new language features that are supposed to be integrated into the new version of the J2SDK, they may have decided to number the java langauge specification as version 5.0. This is somewhat similar to the confusion we had over java 2 and J2SE 1.2 - people are still confused by it.

Going by the same rules the new language standard would then be called java 5.0 (a huge leap from java 2.0, but 2.0 was released during the last century) and the new J2SDK is called J2SDK 1.5. A pattern somewhat similar to the tactic they adapted with Solaris long time ago and also similar to the redhat versioning scheme where version 8.0 and 9.0 are very similar despite the change in major version numbers.

I have just downloaded the SDK (beta 2), let's see if the released notes can shed more light.

Follow Up: The plot thickens