In one of their recent post-JavaOne articles, eweek interviewed James Gosling about the future of the Java language and what we might find in the next two releases (i.e., Mustang and Dolphin) of the Java platform.

I have been very surprised (read disappointed) to discover that Gosling doesn't consider direct XML support a priority. Gosling says:

Direct language support for XML has been a debate for some time. All these things at an abstract level kind of sound like the thing to do. When it comes down to the details, one of the problems ends up being that using Java today you actually get pretty good access to XML. And really what it would end up being is sort of syntactic sugar that makes certain constructions simpler, but can you come up with something that actually makes people's life better by enough that it's worth adding that baggage?

I just hope that James was joking and that he gets his head out of his real-time Java stuff for a moment and looks at what people are asking for... I have already shown (+ here) that DOM programming is not at all simple and straightforward for developers to use and that something along the lines of IBM's XJ would be much appreciated.

In the meantime, Kirill Grouchnikov, a community lead in the Java WS and XML community, wrote a very nice blog entry on Dolphin's native XML support that somehow backs up what I wrote in an earlier entry on the need for native XML support in Java. Kirill goes one or two steps further, though, in that he asks for annotation support and XML autoboxing, two things that I find very, very cool, indeed. Thanks for your wise insights, Kirill!