Patrick Curran

The turn of the year provides an opportunity to review the events of the past and to think about what lies ahead, so I'll address these themes in this month's column. But first I'd like to wish you all a peaceful and successful New Year. Membership It's been a year of steady progress for the JCP. Our membership grew by more than 10% to a total of 1,427. More than 70% of the members are individuals and almost all of the remainder are corporations with a small but growing number of non-profit organizations (about 2%). More than half of the new members came from three countries: the U.S., Germany, and Brazil. Just over 50% of the membership is based in North America, followed by Europe and The Russian Federation at 31%, Asia and The Middle East at 11%, South America at 4%, and Oceania at 2%. The trend is definitely toward more individual and non-profit membership alth... (more)

JSR Watch: Java Mobile and Embedded Spotlight

As I recently spoke at the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days conference at Sun's Santa Clara campus, and the yearly Mobile World Congress conference is held in Barcelona in February, and the majority of the JSRs that have been active in the past few weeks are in the mobile space, I thought it would be opportune to focus on Java ME in this month's column. First, the Developer Days conference. (Quick summary of my presentation: standards are really important and you ignore them at your peril.) It was lively and informative - the first such conference organized by Sun's Mobile ... (more)

Open Source and Open Standards

As I write this article the 2008 FOSDEM (www.fosdem.org/2008/) (Free and Open Source software Developers European Meeting) is about to start. Of course, by the time you read this the meeting will be long over (that's the name of the game with publishing deadlines). I will not be attending, but several members of Sun's OpenJDK (http://openjdk.java.net/) team are gathering in Brussels to meet with the movers and shakers of the free and open source software world. This suggested the topic for this month's column, in which I will explore the relationship between open source and open ... (more)

Smoke-Filled Rooms

It's sometimes argued that the Java Community Process's development procedures are secretive and that the general public is excluded from participating. While this may have been the case in the past, it's no longer true. The majority of JCP Expert Groups now do their work in an open and transparent manner, and this mode of operation is becoming increasingly common. As early as 2004, recognizing the importance of community involvement in the JSR development process, the JCP's Process Document was revised to encourage open communications. We now require that JSR submissions includ... (more)

JSR Watch: Focus on Spec Leads

The Java Community Process requires the development of not only technical specifications, but also Reference Implementations (which prove that specs can be implemented) and conformance test suites (Technology Compatibility Kits or TCKs), which are used to verify that implementations conform to the specifications. The Expert Group (EG), which is typically composed of representatives from all of the member organizations that have an interest in the technology addressed by the JSR, is responsible for these deliverables. Although several (sometimes as many as 20 or even more) organiz... (more)