Slimming Down Java - Software Development Times On The Web

Slimming Down Java
Protocol laid out for deletion of SE features
By Alex Handy

September 15, 2006 — After years of bloating with new features, Java SE may begin to slim down over the next few years. Thanks to some new guidelines added to JSR 270, the Java SE 6 proposal, the JCP can now move to discard older, lesser-used features of the platform.

First on the chopping block: javax.sound.midi. This musical-instrument support file is quite large and rarely used, and it may soon be removed entirely from the Java platform, according to the team working on JSR 270.

Mark Reinhold, Sun’s chief engineer for Java SE 6 platform and specification lead for JSR 270, wrote in his blog on the company Web site that, so far, MIDI support is the only thing scheduled for deletion, but that CORBA was also high on the potential assassination list.

However, he wrote, “it turns out that lots of existing client applications depend upon the RMI-IIOP protocol and it doesn’t appear possible to tease out RMI-IIOP from the rest of the CORBA APIs. Deciding to remove CORBA might be easier once the platform has a robust module system so that the CORBA packages can be downloaded as needed.” (RMI-IIOP stands for Remote Method Invocation over Internet Inter-Orb Protocol, and it’s used by developers to build distributed applications.)

Outside of the blogosphere, Reinhold quipped to SD Times that the Java platform, as a whole, was becoming unwieldy. “This has been in discussion in the JSR 270 expert group for many months. There was a general sense in the expert group that the platform is getting very large. We were all concerned about the size of the minimum Java runtime environment download,” said Reinhold.

The decision to remove MIDI support from Java Standard Edition marks the first time a feature has ever been removed from the language.

To do this, said Reinhold, the Java SE 6 JSR 270 team had to develop a method for submitting deletion proposals. Despite the creation of this process, however, he doesn’t see a massive shedding of features anytime soon.

“There will be no more proposals for [deletion] in the JDK 6 time frame,” said Reinhold. “This is not a general change to the JCP. This is just a statement in the JSR 270 specification that this group believes this is a reasonable process. It actually isn’t even binding on other Java SE groups. Sun intends to follow this policy, but it’s not binding on future iterations of the Java SE platform specs.” Reinhold added that Sun will likely use this procedure in the future, but that it could change or be replaced if problems arise.

UNANIMOUS DECISION
So why remove the MIDI capabilities from Java SE 6? Even Reinhold is uncertain as to why this feature is not used much by Java developers. He said that the JSR 270 team was able to reach a unanimous decision only on MIDI, and that if there is a backlash, the Java SE 7 team can add the support back into the platform.

As for that future version of Java, Reinhold expects it will shed much of the CORBA support, saying that he “would be surprised if CORBA didn’t come up again.” But to remove that package, JSR 277 must first be completed. That JSR seeks to create a module system for Java—one that would allow users to build runtime environments out of only the pieces that they need.

“I think the character of the debate in the future will change once we have a real module system for the platform,” said Reinhold, who added that only MIDI and CORBA were candidates for deletion from Java SE 6.

While BEA Systems, as a member of the JSR 270 expert group, voted for removing MIDI, the company isn’t united behind the idea of deletions. Bill Roth, vice president of BEA’s WebLogic Workshop group, who doesn’t serve on the expert group, complained to SD Times: “I think this is a very bad precedent, since it allows [Sun] to arbitrarily break compatibility with technologies they do not agree with.”

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