Ed Burns's Blog

November 2007 Archives

The Joy of JCP

I have spent some time this week doing a bit of research about Google's OpenSocial project and, from my perspective, it doesn't seem so open. None of the heavy hitters in the server side application platform market are participating. This can concievably be explained by the fact that OpenSocial is all about REST and JavaScript. "The Web is the Platform" not, "The App Server is the Platform", so naturally the server side application usual suspects would not be included. Why then is Oracle listed as a partner? In the world of server side applications, Oracle's chosen platforms have been Java and (somewhat) .NET. If OpenSocial was truly open, wouldn't you expect Oracle's peers, the other major players in the server side application space, to be invited?

Leaving Oracle aside, there were some other glaring omissions from the web 2.0 space. Neither Yahoo! nor Facebook participated. Were they invited? Won't people want to use Flickr based apps on their chosen social platform? Finally, if you want to call something open, there's usually some sort of governancy body that ensures the stakeholders are equally represented (for some definition of "equal").

The Job of the JCP Spec Lead

I'd like to contrast this with the (admittedly much smaller) world of the Java Community Process (JCP) and my (smaller still) view of it as the co-spec lead of the JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0 Expert Group (EG).

At the beginning of October I received an email from JSF stake holder and JBoss representative Gavin King. Gavin had some concerns about how I had been running the JSR. Chief among them was his concern that the important voices in the JSF community were not being herd on the EG. While I respectfully disagreed about that being the case, I agreed to make some changes to address his concerns.

One such change was to delegate the initial design work for our top priority issue for JSF 2.0 to JSF stake holder and Facelets creator Jacob Hookom. Jacob shared his initial sketch with the EG today and immediately we had useful constructive feedback from Ken Paulsen, creator of JSFTemplating, and Gary VanMatre, creator of Apache Shale Clay. That means all of the major templating languages for JSF are actively contributing to JSF 2.0. That's JCP at its best.

JSF Usage and JSF 2.0 Update

Graphical Indicators of JSF Usage

From time to time, the JSF team at Sun surfs around a bit looking for new Internet sites using JSF. This time, my colleague Roger Kitain discovered that Virgin Megastore is a JSF User.

Within Sun, we have an elevator pitch-like slide deck about JSF, and the most important slide therein is at the left. If you want more details about the sites pictured, or you want to add some more sites to the list using JSF, the wiki page is <http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Projects/RealWorldJSFLinks>.

By way of update on JSF 2.0, Jacob Hookom, the developer of Facelets and JSF Expert Group member, is leading the drive toward our number one goal for JSF 2.0: Making custom components easier to develop. We're expecting an EG-private proposal from Jacob this week. Once we get it firmed up we'll share it publically in an Early Draft Review of the spec. In other JSF 2.0 news, we have provisionally closed on the issue of resource loading, as listed in [115-CompResources]. This will also be in the EDR.

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