The BioAPI standard was developed to satisfy the need for a vendor neutral, open standard API which would work with a broad range of biometric technologies and facilitate rapid development of biometric applications. This talk will give a brief overview of evolution of the different versions of the BioAPI standard and the current efforts towards designing a BioAPI Java standard. The BioAPI Java project was started 3 years ago with the intent of creating an object oriented specification semantically equivalent to BioAPI 2.0 that would also increase adoption among BSP developers and application developers. Java was chosen as the language for the reference implementation as it would provide a high degree of portability and also follow closely the BioAPI objective of being OS independent. This talk will outline benefits of BioAPI Java for the industry and standards community, specifically its impact on API adoption, and future work in conformance testing.