Fault-tolerance: Java's missing buzzword

Java has been described as a simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architectural neutral, portable, high-performance, multithreaded and dynamic language, prompting some to describe it as the first buzzword-compliant programming language. The author submits that to deserve full certification-and in the process establish itself as the natural choice for developing large-scale distributed applications-Java misses a crucial buzzword: fault-tolerant. He outlines some promising research directions for building reliable Java-based applications.