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From the Editors: Election should shake up JCP


By SD Times News Team
November 17, 2008 — 
The election of Spring creator Rod Johnson to the Java Community Process executive board could be the kick-start the organization needs to rekindle the enthusiasm of frustrated loyalists. Like them, Johnson will advocate for more openness in the process and for taking elements out of the class library to keep Java fresh. It’s just the kind of shakeup Java needs to emerge from its perceived torpor.

Johnson would appear to have the support of JCP chairman Patrick Curran, who also has pushed for more openness in the advancement of Java specifications. Johnson wants the organization to shift to a forum style of collaboration, abandoning the more-closed mailing lists and protected websites. That’s a good first step, but the rules of the organization might work against him.

In fact, it’s those very stifling rules that have led SpringSource, OSGi and Apache, not to mention other Java businesses, to work on advancing the specification themselves. The old Sun Microsystems chestnut “Collaborate on the standards, compete on the implementation” has broken down into an every-man-for-himself survival situation. Companies and open-source projects pile additions onto the specifications in an effort to work around issues that are held up in the JCP by politics and an arcane method of collaborating.

Johnson realizes what’s at stake. He realizes that if Java isn’t weeded every once in a while, it will be supplanted by leaner languages, such as Python and Ruby. He also believes that if an open-source project comes up with a technological solution that works, then it would be fine for the JCP to embrace the work and create a specification for it. The JCP (and by extension, Sun) needn’t have a monopoly on the creation of Java intellectual property, he believes.

We do too. With the advances in online collaboration and an industry-wide move toward more openness, Johnson wants to take the JCP in the right direction.

We hope the JCP can get beyond the rules, institute their blogs, forums and wikis, and get on with the business of bringing the language and the platform up to date.

Ascend above the silo
There is no standard way of “doing” cloud computing; cloud providers differ in execution and vision. Scan your memory and one word comes to mind: silo. The cloud must not become the new silo, and providers should ensure interoperability.

Microsoft, once the poster child for vendor lock-in, has taken a step in the right direction with Windows Azure. Azure uses Web standards, including SOAP and HTTP, to work with other Web services, and it is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Customers pick which services they want to use.

Meanwhile, the Google App Engine is a walled garden. Google does not provide for cross-cloud interoperability, and it restricts the languages and tools that developers can use.

Microsoft’s actions stand in stark contrast to Google’s proprietary model. Microsoft is allowing customers to use a variety of .NET languages in addition to native code, and it is sponsoring open-source projects for cross-platform development. It is also contributing to the creation of a universal specification for enterprise messaging.

Customers must hold the company to its promises and ensure that cloud computing does not become another layer of lock-in. The prospect of running critical production services hosted in the cloud without having freedom to choose how those services can be used is untenable for any enterprise. And enterprises will not be seduced by grandiose visions of distributed applications or by vendors’ assurances that the cloud is more economical and reliable than the traditional client/server paradigm.

Ultimately, if cloud services are to be useful for developers, they must be interoperable, and the underlying platforms must be flexible. Microsoft seems to understand that.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, Java, Google, JCP, Microsoft, SpringSource


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