J2SE 1.4 (February 6, 2002)
Codename Merlin. This was the first release of the Java platform developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 59. Major changes included:
- Language changes
assert
keyword (Specified in JSR 41.)
- Library improvements
- regular expressions modeled after Perl regular expressions
- exception chaining allows an exception to encapsulate original lower-level exception
- Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) support
- non-blocking IO (named NIO) (New Input/Output) (Specified in JSR 51.)
- logging API (Specified in JSR 47.)
- image I/O API for reading and writing images in formats like JPEG and PNG
- integrated XML parser and XSLT processor (JAXP) (Specified in JSR 5 and JSR 63.)
- integrated security and cryptography extensions (JCE, JSSE, JAAS)
- Java Web Start included (Java Web Start was first released in March, 2001 for J2SE 1.3) (Specified in JSR 56.)
- Preferences API (java.util.prefs)
Support and security updates for Java 1.4 ended in October 2008.
Read more about this topic: Java Version History