Do We Really Need the JCP?
By Allen Holub
December 15, 2004 —
(Page 1 of 2)
The two interesting pieces of news of the past few weeks are Sun’s open-sourcing of Solaris and Sun’s creating a new Java-persistence community-process group by melding together the EJB and JDO efforts. These two events play off each other in interesting ways.
My outsider view of the Java Community Process is that it doesn’t work. All the good technology that’s come out of the process was good technology when it went into the process. Someone came up with something useful, built it, deployed it in real applications, and then put the technology into JCP because it seemed so useful that it would benefit the community.
Most of the other Java-related technology that I use on a daily basis—Eclipse, Hibernate, JUnit, Log4J—started out the same way, as a tested tool that was built for real applications. The authors of these tools never saw the point in handing control over to Sun, however, and I can’t say that I blame them. Hibernate didn’t become accepted because it was built by renegades; it was just better than JDO. Even now that JDO 2.0 has played catch-up, why should I go with a JDO Hibernate clone whose APIs are essentially untested in real applications?
Once any technology becomes widely used, it sets a standard, of course. Hibernate is the standard persistence technology right now, so what’s the point of yet another JCP committee churning out what will undoubtedly be a bad standard? I might buy the notion that Hibernate could be improved or extended by the people who actually use it, but I can’t buy the notion of a competing “standard” created out of whole cloth.
Sun, of course, wants control of the “official” persistence standard, but that argument doesn’t hold much weight. It’s not as if “official” standards like EJB, SQL, HTML, JavaScript and so on have made it possible to write portable code. Either nobody follows standards—the business reasons for not doing so are too compelling—or the standards are so bloated, inconsistent and imprecise that everybody can implement a different subset and claim to be conforming. Java succeeded not because of Sun’s iron hand, but because programmers understood the issues and didn’t use the nonstandard variants.
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