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)
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)
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)
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)
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)