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AS OF 5/17/2008 2:16AM EST
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August 1, 2007 —
Broad brushstrokes have been applied to the canvas that will eventually become the Java EE 6 specification. Those brushstrokes encapsulate plans to address the growing ecosystem of Java EE add-ons and components.
Java EE 6, known as JSR 316, will include a number of other JSR specifications, including those for JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0, the new JAX-RS for RESTful Web services, and the JSR 236-specified timer for application servers. Many of these component JSRs, however, will be maturing alongside the Java EE 6 specification, in the hope of a simultaneous release sometime late in 2008.
Roberto Chinnici and Bill Shannon, both of Sun Microsystems, are leading the Java EE 6 specification. Last month, the pair laid out the initial groundwork for the road ahead; at the forefront of that labor is the effort to build landing pads on top of the Java EE 5 skyscraper.
With its underpinnings based on Java SE 6, Java EE 6 is planned to include a faster JVM and new profiling tools to help track down problems, even into the virtual machine. But with so many companies and developers building extensions to Java EE—such as Hibernate, Struts and Swing, as well as the countless Web toolkits used in cooperation with JSF and JavaServer Pages (JSP)—Java EE is now in dire need of integration points that allow it to work with third-party extensions, rather than against them.
Chinnici, senior staff engineer for Java EE, said that enabling extensibility could only help the platform as a whole. “We've seen over the years that there are a lot of third-party technologies that want to layer into the platform. In this version of the platform, we want to add whatever we can so these will layer more cleanly. Clearly there are a large number of users who've come to rely on these technologies,” said Chinnici. “[It’s an] overall win for the platform if you can use these technologies with a minimum of fuss and configuration headaches.”
As the Java EE 6 specification moves forward, additional JSRs will come under the umbrella of the enterprise edition. JSF 2.0 will be one of those specifications, though the expert committee for JSR 314 (the specification for JSF 2.0) is still growing, according to Roger Kitain, staff engineer at Sun and a member of that committee. He believes that JSF 2.0 should gain extensive support for AJAX, to work in tune with Java application servers. Kitain noted that five members of the JSR 314 committee are deeply involved in AJAX in their day-to-day lives.
More JSRs may be generated for Java EE Profiles, a new feature of the enterprise edition that was conjured up in the initial draft of JSR 316. Profiles, explained Chinnici, amount to optimized Java EE stacks that are specifically tailored to common duties. Each of these profiles will be defined in its own JSR, he said, and added that the first and only of these to appear in time for Java EE 6's release would be a Web-specific profile. Chinnici said he hopes that, in the future, additional profiles will be defined, particularly for jobs such as integration.
But the road to the final Java EE 6 specification has its naysayers. Geir Magnusson Jr. represented the Apache Software Foundation on the Java EE 6 executive committee, and in that capacity he voted against the formation of JSR 316, the only negative vote during the approval process.
Magnusson, who currently heads up software development at Internet TV startup Joost, is also the father of the Harmony project, which is building an Apache-licensed implementation of Java SE 5. Magnusson has cited Sun's unclear licensing policies as a point of friction between Sun and Apache. Magnusson, however, doesn’t complain about the technical merits of the Java EE 6 plans; his thumbs-down vote was cast for purely political reasons, he admitted to SD Times in an e-mail.
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