Introduction

About This Release

This is the early access, beta test release of the Java Development Kit 1.1, also known as the (JDK^TM). The JDK lets you write applets and applications that conform to the 1.1 Java Core API. It includes improvements in functionality, performance, and quality over version 1.0.2. The purpose of this release is to get the earliest possible feature-complete implementation into your hands so you can try so that the new APIs, find and report bugs, and begin planning your new products.

NOTE: This release is not intended for you to commercialize and ship products. The new APIs are not final and may have changes in the FCS release.

As with any beta-test release, we are still vigorously testing and debugging. For the current status, see the web page "Known Bugs" posted on http://java.sun.com/products/JDK/1.1. Please report bugs as noted below under "Reporting Bugs." Your comments are important to making this release successful. We are committed to fixing bugs for the 1.1 release, and will also use your feedback to help plan future releases. To submit comments, send mail to jdk-comments@java.sun.com.

VERSION COMPATIBILITY: In general, any applet or application which ran in 1.0.2 should run correctly in 1.1 beta. A failure to do so is a bug, except for a small number of cases where compatibility has had to be broken to fix implementation or design bugs. See the document titled "Compatibility" at http://java.sun.com/products/JDK/1.1/compatibility.html If you find any such incompatibilities that are not listed on the Compatibility web page, please report them to us as noted below under "Reporting Bugs," and mention that they are compatibility bugs. Compatibility is very important to us.

AWT WIN32 RE-WRITE: The Win32 version of the AWT was re-written 100% from scratch and this is the first time it is getting out to a very wide audience. Thus, we expect this large beta audience will find many unknown bugs. If you find any bugs, please report them as noted below under "Reporting Bugs," so that we an fix them before our final release.

(The previous text is copied from the README file.)

What This Documentation Covers

NOTE - The documentation included in this release covers only the new features of version 1.1. It does not attempt to cover the features that have remained unchanged since 1.0.

The Contents page of this documentation contains links to all of the documentation in this release. Note the first few entires are actually located in the java (software) directory rather than under docs (documentation). If you download just the documentation and not the software, you will not be able to access those files.

Please read the README file for:

Introduction
Purpose
What the JDK Contains
Installation Notes
Where to Find More Information
Submitting Comments
Running Applets with the Applet Viewer
Debugging Programs with the Java Debugger

This documentation package is entirely HTML. Portable Document Format (PDF) and Postscript (PS) versions of sections of this document are also available from the download page http://java.sun.com/products/JDK/1.1

For the most part, this JDK documentation is standalone. This means once you've downloaded the JDK docs, you can disconnect from the web, and browse all the docs locally.