In the ZDNet article, What does the future hold for the Java Community Process (JCP)?, Ed Burnette interviewed Tony de la Lama, the vice president of research and development at Embarcadero Technologies. Prior to joining Embarcadero, de la Lama was the general manager of Java at Borland and a founding member of the JCP executive committee, on which he served from 2000 to 2003.

On the future of the JCP, de la Lama said:

It’s no coincidence that Java has been a successful platform, changing the technology landscape for businesses in profound ways. The fact that Java was not driven by a single vendor and instead has taken a managed community based approach as a way to evolve the technology is a direct reason for the platform’s wide acceptance and continued relevancy to businesses of all sizes.

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. No more battles as elephants position themselves, let the technologies compete on their own merits and let the beauty of the many driving technology, replace the slow pace of the few.

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. Sure, there could be some politics but this is always the case in these situations. Ultimately, the ongoing success of the Java platform will be the responsibility of Oracle, its advisory committee and the users. If Oracle wields too tight a control that negatively affects the platform the users will complain.

What is your opinion? If you were Oracle, how would you guide the JCP into the future?