The JCP And Java Standards

My friend Mike came across an interesting wiki on Struts/JSF by Craig McClanahan himself… Struts - More About JSF

It’s an interesting wiki post… One comment I found interesting is: Every technology goes through a lifecycle of innovation, followed by popularization, followed (often, but quite often in the Java world) by standardization, followed by commoditization.

As always, there are two sides. And since I am the rebelous one, I’ll post the other: Howard Lewis Ship’s View on JSF

One very interesting comment that Howard made was the JSR concept is fundamentally flawed; you don’t innovate by committee

JSF was innovated by a committe. Sure you will say that Struts is the predecesor to JSF, so JSF wasn’t really innovated by a committe. And I say, why can’t the JCP build JSR’s out of existing, proven technologies, instead of taking a bunch of ideas which as a whole have never been proved, and creating JSR’s from those ideas? There are a number of places where great ideas turned to JSR’s, then to implementations, then to standards, then to crap. All because the the ideas were never proven to work in the real world. So then the minds get back together and try something else. Why does the JCP function like this? Why do they continually think that they can think of a better solution than one that has already been proved? Why does the JCP always have to think of a new and better solution instead of just standardizing an existing one?

I think the JCP would function better if Craig’s statement was actually true… That the standardization was made around a proven, popular solution to a problem. I would love it if Struts, Hibernate, Log4j, etc became the standards rather than ideas based on those technologies becoming the standards. Maybe the JCP needs an incubator. A place where ideas can be tried before they become standards. And the ones that actually become popular move out of the incubator into JSR’s. Kinda like Jakarta’s Incubator. Maybe this begs the question; Are JSR’s standards or a way to incubate an idea? If the former, then the JCP needs an incubator. If the later, then the JCP needs a way to move the JSR’s that get popular and survive to a “Standard”. And there should be one “Standard” solution for a given problem set. This would mean that both CMP and JDO cannot be standards. I think this would greatly help Java’s popularity since there are so many “Standards” for a given problem, no one knows which “Standard” to choose. MicroSoft makes this much easier. “Use us and you will always know what the Standard is.” Very simple. I guarantee you that Java would be more popluar if user’s didn’t have to evaluate which persistence, logging, presentation, management, xml, etc, etc framework to use. Am I saying there shouldn’t be options? Not at all. There will always be more than 1 way to solve a problem. But the community should decide (based on simple majority) what the 1 standard solution to a given problem is. And that standard should be the most proven and most popular one. And the JCP should say, “The standards are x, y, and z”. And when technology w becomes more popular and more proven then x, the standard changes.