Recently, I discussed the topic with Tony de la Lama, senior vice president of research and development, at Embarcadero Technologies. Tony was a JCP founding executive committee member from 2000-2003 and prior to joining Embarcadero was general manager of Borland's Java business, so he knows a thing or two about how the JCP works (or fails to work).
Back in the time frame when Tony was a member of the JCP, I was evaluating application servers for a small company that was planning to launch an online bill payment system. We were planning to use Java application servers as the backbone of a highly scalable back end. Borland had an application server at that time, and the presentation they gave to us was pretty impressive. So, I wonder if perhaps I had some contact with Tony back then.
Of course, we also considered other appserver vendors, including IBM and WebLogic. Ultimately, I worked on a partnership agreement that my company signed with WebLogic. Unfortunately, the project never actually happened, becoming yet another victim of the dot-com crash.
But back to the interview. In Tony's view, the JCP is a central aspect of what must be improved with respect to Java, due in particular to its glacial rate of progress:
If there's a major focus area to improve however, it would be the JCP's speed and agility which correlates to the Java platform's evolutionary velocity. There are many fine technologies being developed outside of the JCP process and are later brought into the platform, but why haven't those technologies incubated from within the JCP? For the JCP to stay relevant it needs to look for ways to develop a bias for speed in idea incubation, implementation and ultimately inclusion of new technologies faster than has been possible in the past.
In my view, with standards organizations, there is always a conflict between embrace of new technologies and the need to maintain stability within the progress of the standard. As we all know, often new technologies sound great, but the promise never comes to be. Also, often many different, and conflicting, new technologies spring up to address the same problem. So, how is a standards committee to react?
In the Linux world, the Debian project proceeds very slowly. Their stable edition is rock solid. However, Debian Stable also sometimes does not offer support for newer hardware. Ubuntu takes the opposite approach: it uses Debian Unstable as its basis, taking a new snapshot every six months, wraps that core with its own distribution components, and releases it to the world. The result: comparatively buggy releases, but pretty up to date with respect to hardware support. The JCP's method has often been to stand back and watch how things play out -- more Debian-like than Ubuntu-like. Surely this is sensible for a platform that is intended to provide high reliability, availability, and stability, right? Yet, the problem of JCP involvement in, and guidance of, Java innovation remains.
Tony suggests that one possibility for changing this would be for Oracle to start over, and use java.net as the incubator for new Java technologies that are potential candidates for becoming a part of the Java standard:
An alternative strategy is for Oracle to wipe the slate clean and start over by establishing itself as the official corporate sponsor of Java with decision making powers to guide a highly mobile and fast moving repository of all open source projects related to Java. New Java technologies would begin life on Java.net and with the input of an advisory body those technologies showing the most promise would be promoted to officially sponsored Java projects.
I have always had a fondness for books, both technical and non-technical. However, it seems to get increasingly difficult to read complete books. I have found that instead of reading entire books on software development, I tend to read specific chapters and portions that seem most relevant, useful, and interesting to me. In this blog post, I look at the ten chapters of software development books that I have found to be most influential or most impressive in my career so far as a software developer. These are chapters that I can enthusiastically recommend to any software developer who either wants to learn the subject of that chapter or who just wants to see what an especially well-written chapter can do...
The latest 5.0dev drop of the Flamingo library (code-named Imogene) provides full right-to-left (RTL) support for the ribbon component and all its parts. Here are some screenshots of the ribbon running under iw-IL locale using the Office Blue 2007 skin from Substance core and Substance Flamingo plugin. The first screenshot shows the full RTL ribbon in action – click to see fullsize view ...
During the time Toni and I were giving a NetBeans Platform Certified Training in Belgrade, Serbia, the students from the NetBeans User Group Serbia made several small movies, amongst which was a pretty long interview with Toni and myself. And today I found they've posted the whole interview on YouTube and on their site. Here it is the whole interview, in which questions such as the following are asked and answered: "Who are you and what do you do?" "What are the main benefits of using NetBeans IDE?", "What's new in the upcoming NetBeans Platform 6.9?", "How many applications are there out there on the NetBeans Platform?", "How did Toni and Geertjan meet?" ...
Once again the FUD around Solaris and OpenSolaris fate started to spread after Dana Blankenhorn misunderstood the licensing terms and used a eye catching and visitor increasing title, Oracle taking back OpenSolaris, for his blog entry. Well, from this article we can get that even the veteran writers can get things wrong and spread incorrect news :-) Folks, Solairs is one of the biggest Sun assets that Oracle is now own by taking over Sun . Solaris and OpenSolaris are going to be around in a much better shape than before because Oracle is betting its fight for the market share on this operating system to form a complete stack including storage, hardware, OS, middle-ware, support and so on...
Geertjan Wielenga pointed out the Raytheon Virtual Control enterprise management and control system, "yet another NetBeans Platform application in the defense sector." I'm sure I must have sent out an application for employment to Raytheon multiple times during my career as a software engineer, since they have offices in my region and the work is in the sector where I've done most of my development. So, I find the fact that Raytheon would choose NetBeans as the platform for developing an application whose "robust capabilities are being applied across the LVC domains to support some of the most critical development programs in the Department of Defense (DoD)" to be yet another indicator of the stability and reliability that NetBeans provides...
Have you ever got into the situation where you feel like you need to stretch the limits of HTTP form processing? Sometimes when developing complex web applications you end up with a form that has just too many features on it. This situation is particularly common when the application uses Ajax forms, as these forms often end up accumulating an enormous amount of funcionality - different actions for different buttons, events related to list choices or check box changes, partial screen updates etc. One of the applications I'm currently working on has a requirement that the user should be able to upload files as part of bigger system interactions...
In the Forums, in the LWUIT forum, mahdi_hijaze posted a Form.getComponentAt() related suggestion: Hi LWUIT team, Form.getComponentIndex( int index ) is mapped to the internal content pane, so I expected that the Form.getComponentAt( int index ) is also mapped to the content pane which it is not. I may be wrong but I feel it is better to be...
In the Java SE forum, pisaia asks for help with a Multiple Menu Program: Hi, I want to create a program in Java, and I am using JFrames for my GUI. What the program does is that it has some buttons on a JFrame and each button does an event. One of this buttons has to lead in a new menu. I have decided that the...
In the GlassFish forum, cogido is getting an Exception while loading the app : java.lang.RuntimeException: EJB Container: Hello, I have some code that should be able to run using JDK 1.5 and JDK 1.6 I am using SwingWorker. I would like to know if when the end user is using JDK 1.6, the code will use the SwingWorker from "javax.swing.SwingWorker" and...
The Java Community Process, or JCP, was created by Sun as the standards setting body for the Java language, libraries, and runtime. From 1998 to 2009, Sun ruled the JCP with an iron fist, but now that Oracle is calling the shots that will inevitably be changing. Recently, I discussed the topic with Tony de la Lama, senior vice president of research and development, at Embarcadero Technologies. Tony was a JCP founding executive committee member from 2000-2003 and prior to joining Embarcadero was general manager of Borland's Java business, so he knows a thing or two about how the JCP works (or fails to work)...
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