Apache Leaving JCP Side Note

Take a breath. Good. In... Out...

OK.

Now stop and think.

This is not really that bad for Java the language. Or Java the community. And now lets hope Apache goes forward with Harmony and creates something special. If they put a different language on it, even better.

Does the community need JSRs? Does it really need "standards"? (Yep I quoted that. We could do a whole nother post on Sun/Oracle specs parading as standards. Or how if you wait 10 years for ISO standards you wind up with C++.)

No and No.

Java in the last 7 or so years has been dominated by projects that are not standards. Why? Because they are solid, dependable, growing projects. Lets name a few. Log4j/slf4j. Struts. Hibernate. Spring. That took 5 seconds. And if I spent the time, I could easily rattle off a dozen more.

Plain and simple, these projects fill needs that software developers have. If the Java community sat around and waited for Sun (or Oracle) to fill every hole, then the Java community really would have died on the vine.

In fact waiting for a large company to solve basic issues is a crap shoot at best. Sun did the world a huge favor releasing Java and the JVM. They spent millions of dollars developing Java/JVM technology. And basically gave it away for free. For that, they deserve a tremendous amount of thanks.

However, for 15+ years, they failed to really nurture it in some aspects. I would argue that is because, they didn't know what to do with it or how to capitalize on it.

For example, 15+ years later and we have as part of the standard
poor date handling
poor math libs
poor collections libs
poor ORM (JPA is a disaster. Like JDO and EJB/EJBQL before it.)
poor CDI
two weak tries at web ui interaction (JSP & JSF. Can we please stick the fork in JSF?)
poor threading/concurrency model (Its getting better.)

Projects and people outside Sun did a fantastic job of rising to the occasion and filling these needs. Without standards without JSRs and without JCPs.