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Posted by editor on July 11, 2005 at 8:44 AM EDT

The process of the Java Community Process

Given the adage about never wanting to see sausage or laws getting made, do you really want to know how JSR's are created? I actually think the process is interesting because if you tour the complete list of JSR's at jcp.org you can recognize JSR's that have become parts of the core language (generics, assertions) and commonly-used extensions (JSF, concurrency). Keep looking and you'll also JSR's that have been withdrawn (JSR 61: Phonelets), rejected (JSR 20: Orthogonal Persistence, JSR 178: Mobile Game API), and others that appear dormant at best (JSR 104: XML Trust Service, supposedly forming an expert group since March, 2001).

What makes a JSR expert group succeed where many have failed? In Seven Secrets of the Star Spec Leads, featured in today's Projects and Communities section, Frank Sommers and Bill Venners collected the opinions of sixteen spec leads from various parts of the Java community, to find out what works. Do read the whole article, but in list form, the secrets are:

  1. Understand what you want
  2. Get the right people
  3. Delegate
  4. Foster communication
  5. Keep the ball visibly rolling
  6. Accomodate agendas without sacrificing technical excellence
  7. Learn from others

Few of us will be in the position of managing a JSR, but take a look at that list and see if it doesn't also make sense for project management on a lot of different levels.

Also in Projects and Communities, members of the Java Games Community who want to move beyond 2D sprites may want to check out Sony Ericsson's Mobile Java 3D Developer Resources page, which collects docs, tools, tips, tricks, and lists of devices that support Mobile Java 3D. It also hosts case studies and a Mobile Java 3D game gallery.

In today's Weblogs, William C. Wake has a Brief review - Fit for Developing Software: "This book is unique. While you can find information about Fit and fixtures on the web, what's on the web is much less readable than what this book provides. The book also gives you an extended example and helpful advice from two experts."

Bruce Boyes looks at Top Ten Myths of Embedded Security, and what Java offers: "This online article by by Mukesh Lulla, TeamF1 is a pretty good overview of the top 10 misconceptions about embedded security. It's worth mentioning here for a couple of reasons."

In Greetings, introducing myself, David Herron writes: "I work in the Java SE Quality Engineering team. What I expect to bring to the java.net blogs is exposure for the how Java is tested at Sun, and testing issues in general."

In Also in Java Today , The DevX article Cook Up Powerful Mail-Processing Scripts with Jython Procmail Recipes shows how to intercept e-mail on its way to a mailbox and perform processing on it to put selected values into a database, with Jython Procmail recipes. "Their ability to easily hook into existing Java APIs also makes recipes simple to implement."

EJB 3.0 offers a far simpler programming model than its convoluted predecessor, EJB 2.1, but will the developers who've moved to other frameworks be willing to come back? In POJO Application Frameworks: Spring Vs. EJB 3.0, Michael Yuan compares EJB 3.0 to the popular Spring framework, looking at their relative uses of annotations and descriptors and assessing the two in terms of practicality and power.

In today's Forums, pdoubleya offers a counter-argument Re: Install on demand: "One of the 'promises' of the Java 'Plaftorm' is that there actually is a platform you can build on and depend on. This was all sketched out before the mass of the population had reliable high-speed internet access. The upside is that once a version of the JDK is installed, *all* Java programs written for that JDK or earlier should find *all* of the JDK resources they were written to use. If you have automatic download, and the download fails, is interrupted, etc., the program/applet will not work, and a reasonable conclusion would be, 'Hmm. Java sucks.'"

alanstange has a question about Dtrace and mustang: "Can someone post a simple example of using Dtrace and Mustang (with build 39 or later)? I'm trying to get this to work using the provider syntax from some Javaone 05 notes and I'm missing something. Is there some command line options which enables the Dtrace providers?

In this week's Spotlight: Project Matisse: If you saw James Gosling's keynote and "toy show" at JavaOne (or if you read his blog about it), then you might be interested in trying out "Matisse", the new form designer for NetBeans. If so, check out Project Matisse - Java GUI easy & good looking "by default", which describes Matisse's goals and its integration into the latest NetBeans source.

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The process of the Java Community Process
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