When it comes to security, Sun Microsystems' release of the Java TM 2 platform is both the end of an era, and the dawn of a new age for the enterprise Java platform. With the release of the Java TM 2 platform at the Java SM Internet Business Expo in New York on December 8, Sun delivered a new enterprise security model that, at long last, gives developers and network administrators integrated, flexible, fine-grained control over virtually all aspects of enterprise applet, component, servlet, application, and data safety. The Java TM 2 platform security model Intrinsic to this release of the Java TM 2 platform is the new security model, a policy-based, configurable, and extensible access control model for users, groups, and application elements. With the general availability of the Java TM 2 platform's new enterprise security model, applets and applications can grow up and are no longer confined to the sandbox. We're moving from providing good protection and no control, to an architecturally complete system for establishing domains of protection, setting policies for those domains and, within a complex distributed application, letting developers easily deal with modern security mechanisms, such as rights, encryption, digital signatures, and certificates.
Security is now fully under the control of developers and administrators.
The new Java TM 2 platform security model also promises to reduce distributed system development time and costs. Indeed, the Java TM 2 platform and the Java Cryptography Extension API are shipped with built-in implementations of all basic security services. In other systems, such as UNIX or Windows, you can't add resources and secure them without modifying the core security code. With the Java TM 2 platform, we capture permission semantics in application-definable objects, so developers can easily add resources and permissions. That's important when you're building a platform that needs to scale from the smart card to the mainframe, because we don't know what devices we're going to land on as we go down the road.