Modular Java SE
From APIDesign
I like puzzles that tease my mind (a bit). Last week I've been introduced to one. Modularize JDK (a described at Mark Reinhold's blog). This page will capture my thoughts on this topic.
There can be many reasons for having modular JDK, but to simplify things, let's stick with one: we want to reach a point in future, when it will be enough to download just a limited set of JDK to execute an applet/application/server, etc.
The biggest obstacle that could prevent such goals is to define such limited pieces, make them independent and yet keep binary compatibility for the whole Java SE. Let's look at individual problems.
java.applet and java.beans
Obviously you may be interested in using JavaBeans specification and you may not want to know anything about applets. Yet you may want to use applets and don't care about introspection and BeanInfos provided by JavaBeans.