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JCP holds elections, contemplates OpenJDK


By Alex Handy
December 23, 2009 — 
November's election results for the executive committee of the Java Community Process saw the return of many familiar faces to the panel. And though the elections proved that the JCP is still functioning normally, there are still doubts about whether its activities are being hampered by the stalled Oracle/Sun merger.

While existing Java Specification Requests, such as the Java EE 6 specification, have continued on in the JCP process during the merger, the JCP has had no new specification submissions since the merger was announced. Additionally, no JSRs have entered the early draft review stage, either.

The JCP also decided this fall that it would have a go at the OpenJDK specification before its release. But since the time the JCP made this decision, there have been no specification submissions to the JCP under the OpenJDK umbrella.

There are numerous changes to the OpenJDK that will require their own JSRs. Some changes already have JSRs, such as Project Jigsaw, which is an implementation of JSR 294: Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language. But, ironically, though this JSR is being implemented in the OpenJDK 7, it is not intended for completion in time for the first public release of the OpenJDK. Instead, JSR 294 is expected to be tested in the OpenJDK, but finished in time for the next release of Java, which would be Java SE 8.

And though the OpenJDK has not yet begun to work its way through the JCP, past experiences have shown that one to two years is a typical period of time for the JCP to work on a specification. Even when specifications are finished and brought to the JCP for a rubber stamp, they can take up to a year.

This is what happened when the OSGi specification was brought to the JCP. JSR 291, which essentially approved the OSGi way of doing things, took a year and a half to gain approval. Even then, the OSGi specification also saw members voting against its approval as a JSR, arguing that the JCP should not rubber stamp existing standards. Sun Microsystems itself actually voted against the OSGi public review for this reason. Similarly, the OpenJDK has been developed outside the JCP.

Voting results
The JCP Executive Committee elections proved to be about as popular as America's off-year general elections: only 21% of the membership actually voted.

The results placed Doug Lea in a one-year seat on the executive committee for Java SE/EE. Lea is a professor of computer science at the State University of New York at Oswego. He was the chair of JSR 166 and the author of “Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns.”

Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle were also elected to the executive committee. Lea and all four of these companies were re-elected to their existing seats. Nortel was not re-elected.

The open seat elections were more contentious, and concurrency expert Tim Peierls won out over Liferay, Terracotta and Matthew McCullough, a Denver-based software development consultant.

The Java ME executive committee elections saw AT&T, Siemens, SK Telecom, T-Mobile and Vodafone all elected to seats. Ericsson, Motorola and Qisda all lost their seats.

Jacob Feldman, the specification lead on JSR 331: Constraint Programming API, won election to the open seat on the Java ME executive committee.


Related Search Term(s): Java


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