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What users want from Oracle's Java Community Process

Skeptics fear Oracle will continue a heavy-handed tradition, while some see open source efforts starting to sideline the JCP

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 03/17/10

Page 2 of 2

Another member of the Saint Louis Java Users Group steering committee, Jeff Cunningham, says Oracle could make the process more inclusive and avoid skirmishes like what happened between Sun and the Apache Foundation, which had sparred over issues relating to Apache seeking a Java technology compatibility kit for the Harmony version of Java. Cunningham is a software engineer at Oracle.

Sun, Cunningham says, perhaps did take a bit of a strong-arm approach to the JCP, but he argues that such an approach is sometimes is necessary to get things done. "Standards committees kind of spiral off into thumb-twiddling and inaction," Cunningham says. "I think a good steward of the committee process will endeavor to move something through there and make participants come together and compromise."

Is the Java community sidelining the JCP?
Although Oracle has been silent on how the JCP will work now that it owns Java, the JCP has become more open in the nine months between Oracle's announcement last spring that it would buy Sun to the completion of the acquisition this winter, notes Red Hat's Little. For example, many JSRs now have public mailing lists.

But Little expresses concern about whether there would be a version 7 of enterprise Java: "We'd obviously like to know whether that is going to happen or not."

"I think, frankly, [the JCP] has to change for the JCP to be relevant," says JCP SE/EE committee member Rod Johnson, who is general manager of SpringSource, the developer of the Spring Framework for Java. The most interesting developments around Java happen outside of Sun or Oracle anyway, he says.

For example, although a JSR has arisen based on the dependency injection portion of Spring, developers of the framework took the position that the community wanted faster innovation and having a JSR just for the sake of having specification was not in the best interests of the community, Johnson says.

Open source, meanwhile, has filled in for the JCP process, he said. "Open source has partly taken on some of the role of what the JSR was needed to do," Johnson says.

This article, "What users want from Oracle's Java Community Process," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in Java and software development at InfoWorld.com.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.