The one thing we are told is guaranteed to stay the same on the Internet is the Java programming language. It has, as it were, conquered the desktop. Java will certainly be here, but what kind of Java? In Hong Kong, David Soon, a senior technical consultant at Sun, said: 'A lot of people have said that we have achieved ubiquity on the desktop.' A few days ago, however, JavaSoft, the branch of Sun that deals with Java, released the latest update of the newest version of the Java Developer Kit or JDK. This version is called 1.1.3 (the difference between an 'update' and a version is that an update fixes small bugs and problems but adds no new features; a version adds new features). Mr Soon said most Internet browsers by Netscape and Microsoft only supported 1.0.2. This was a pity, he said, because the new version 1.2 had so many more features. 'The new release, 1.1, has solved a lot of problems of the original release. It is more efficient and it performs better as well,' he said. Sun's big task now is to get the Netscapes and the Microsofts to support the new version in their browsers. 'Not until 1.1 is on all the browsers will we see things begin to happen,' Mr Soon said. 'Internationalisation is far better in 1.1 than in the previous version,' he said. 'There is support for many different character sets and conversion between Big 5 and GB, for example.' (GB stands for Guo Biao, the Chinese character set of simplified characters officially used in China. Big 5 is the set of traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, although it is not official).
