Amazon has unveiled the details of its development kit for its Kindle e-book reader.

The so called “Kindle development kit for active content” (or KDK) will be based on Java 1.4 Personal Basis Profile (JSR 217); custom additional APIs will be available for networking, local storage, specific UI components, etc. (see javadoc).

As strongly as I feel about not actually owning what’s on your Kindle, this comes as a good news for Java when its future is being questioned after the Oracle merger.

You can read the KDK FAQ there.