Web services, desktop, XML likely to be themes Fresh from introducing a major upgrade to the Java platform, Sun Microsystems officials on Thursday revealed some details of the next release of Java, code-named “Mustang” and expected in Spring 2006.Proposed themes of Mustang include XML, Web services, the Java desktop, and large systems performance, according to Graham Hamilton, Sun Java Platform vice president and fellow, during a conference call to unveil J2SE 5.0.Mustang will be the subject of multiple JSRs (Java Specification Requests), and a huge number of feature requests is anticipated, according to Sun. The 2006 arrival date, though, did not emerge from an engineering process but rather from gauging how often the user community wants an update, said James Gosling, CTO of the Sun Developer Products Group. Sun officials during the teleconference also recommitted to the company’s policy of maintaining compatability rather than submitting the entire platform to an open source availability scheme. Developers still will get free source code for J2SE 5.0 though, Hamilton said.“We have a very strong compatability requirement. If you’re going to ship products based on it, we ask that [the products] be compatible,” Hamilton said. Software Development