… or they could just call it “Java 1.5.0_04”. 
“Java 2, Enterprise Edition” could be called “Java Enterprise Extensions” instead of implying it replaces the “standard edition” base java.
Crazy, I know.
The A-Team crack Sun marketing commando Death-Squad have been notified, and you should shortly be dragged from your home and carted off to the Gulag.
Frickin outrageous - suggesting a scheme that people would understand and would enhance the java brand. You filthy commie bastard!
I think Sun has simply just not paying attention too much about Java versioning and name after the renamed it Java 2. Now they seem to give much more importance to the marketing of Java. There’s no harm to try simplifying things. What I don’t like is they called Java 5 and 1.5 at the same time. Why continuing using two versoning systems?
Some people need to test the Java version from within code. It would be somewhat tedious if the structure of the values being tested were to change. In particular a change in the leading digit might be (erroneously) taken to mean that some backward compatibility had been lost and that it might be a good idea not to proceed further (with program execution). Hence 1.5 is the version you test for in code, while “5” is the label on the outside of the box (intended for humans).
Many Microsoft products have similar (or often worse) disparities between the internal version (for programmer use) and the external marketing label. So for example “Windows XP” has the internal version 5.1.
java 5.0 standard edition,
i thought it was j5se
and now back to jse, sun need to sort out a numbering system properly and just stick to it!
I can imagine newbies discussing their versions of Java.
N1: I have Java 5.0.
N2: Where did you get it from? I have J2SE.
N3: I have JSE. Is that the same as J2SE?
N4: Are any of those versions that same as J2SE 1.5.4?
N5: I want to start programming with Java. What version do I install?
N6: I have Java 5, J2SE, J2SE 1.5.4 and J2SE 5.
Forget the newbies… every now and then I go to sun’s site to download the JVM (yeah, throw that in your list of stuff to confuse newbies) which is now mostly known as the SDK… but either way… there are a lot of similar acronymns and sometimes I find myself having to do some searching to figure out the differences… I’ve been working with java since 1.0 was current, so I feel like I’m entitled to a non-newbie title. J2EE was one I wasn’t sure about once, it at least used to be listed on the SDK download screen when I had already told it I wanted to download the SDK, I think it was even listed before the SDK download link.