Following last weeks announcement of some of the details of the upcoming EJB3.0 spec, there is a heated discussion about the benefits and disadvantages of both approaches (with comments from Gavin King on Hibernate thrown into the mix), on TheServerSide.com.
EJB3.0 spec announcement at ServerSide Symposium
At yesterdays ServerSide Symposium conference there was an annoucement and preview of some of the details of the upcoming EJB3.0 specification.
Good news is it is a complete departure from the current EJB programming model involving Home, Remote and Local interfaces, and instead using metadata markup in the source to specify that a given Class is an EJB.
More details here
JDO 2 JSR Ballot results – split results across involved groups
The final review ballot for JSR 243 for the JDO 2 spec showed mixed acceptance of the new spec, and the comments from some of the ballot rejections are surprising.
There was majority acceptance across most of the involved groups and individuals, which included:
- Apache Software Foundation
- Apple Computer, Inc.
- Borland Software Corporation
- Caldera Systems
- Fujitsu Limited
- Hewlett-Packard
- IONA Technologies PLC
- Lea, Doug
- Macromedia, Inc.
- Monson-Haefel, Richard
- Nokia Networks
- Sun Microsystems, Inc.
but more surprisingly, IBM, Oracle and BEA Systems all rejected the JSR.
Their reasons for rejecting the spec seemed to be consistently that there is too much overlap with other existing JSRs. Without mentioning exactly what JSRs they are refering too, one can only wonder if they are refering to the EJB3.0 spec. It seems odd that the only three parties to reject this spec are the three major J2EE Server providers – as these three companies already have substantial investment within EJB Entity Bean implementations in their existing products, maybe they see this JSR as too much of a step away from their current product directions?
This is a big shame, because something definitely needs to replace the Entity Bean portion of the EJB spec. One can only hope that the eventual release of the EJB3.0 spec is going to show a move towards a JDO/Hibernate-like approach to Persistence.
James Gosling’s comments on IBM’s push to Open Source Java
In James Gosling’s blog this week he comments on IBM’s letters asking Sun to Open Source Java.
The main question is what does IBM stand to gain from this. Currently the Java source is free to anyone to download, and I believe anyone is also free to implement their own VM, providing if it is distributed it passes Sun’s certification that it is bytecode compatible with other JVM implementations, implements the whole specification, and doesn’t include any proprietary extenstions. IBM do this today – you can download IBM’s own JVM from their site.
So it would seem IBM’s main interest here is to implement a JVM and not have to pass Sun’s certification. So why would they do this? One can only assume that they wish to take Java in a different direction than Sun and add other features that are currently not provided.
This is exactly what Sun is trying to avoid – if this situation happens then the Java platform may become fragmented with many different incompatible versions. Incidentally, this is what Microsoft attempted with their own JVM flavor (J++), that Sun eventually managed to have stopped in a court case.