I believe this is tentatively scheduled for 1.4, but that is subject to JCP approval. I believe we'll be demo-ing some exciting stuff with the archiver at JavaOne. Check for the JavaBeans sessions. It transparently accesses virtually all Java methods, fields, classes, and objects. Give it a look.
Type inferencing allows compile time type checking through type inferencing.
These are pure compute tasks like doing a Fibbonacci sequence. It should be available next week at JavaOne. It's part of the Javasoft series of books. Sun produced a JavaBeans bridge for ActiveX Packager, which allows JavaBeans to be wrapped as COM objects. Sun has not done much work on the JavaBeans bridge recently.