Thursday, August 2, 2012

sun.* Packages

Came accross this the other day when a coworker used sun.misc.Base64Decoder, something didn't feel right about the package name, but I had no justification on why he shouldn't use it. After a bit of searching I found the following link:
Sun Packages FAQ  

Quote:
The java.*, javax.* and org.* packages documented in the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition API Specification make up the official, supported, public interface.
 If a Java program directly calls only API in these packages, it will operate on all Java-compatible platforms, regardless of the underlying OS platform.


 The sun.* packages are not part of the supported, public interface. A Java program that directly calls into sun.* packages is not guaranteed to work on all Java-compatible platforms. In fact, such a program is not guaranteed to work even in future versions on the same platform.

Makes obvious sense now, but it was actually something I was not aware of.

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