Thursday, December 09, 2010

JCP is dead - long live Java

Finally - JCP is dead. Not because of the bad APIs it produced to help Sun/Oracle sell products, but because of licencing restrictions and broken promises. But at least it's dead, and Java Language can finally move forward and be open.

And the way forward is really open APIs, with implementations that support not only in latest J2SE, but also GCJ, Mono and other VMs that support Java programming language. Without 'rewrite everything in pure Java' - but playing nice with other languages and VMs.

My intention is to pick the one or 2 of the Java APIs  I had the most pain with - JSSE and NIO - and try to improve tomcat-native and APR bindings to the point they are a better APIs. They are already faster and provide far more features - but need more docs and friendlier APIs.

Hopefully people will pick the other Java API that went beyond complexity craziness - it's time for an alternative to the Servlet API which supports the new reality of the web and is not just an extension of CGIs with J2EE mega-complexity added in.

Now is the time to promote the other APIs that were shadowed by the JCP false claims of 'open' and 'standard', time for people to re-learn about better alternatives to java.sql, java logging, swing, RMI or URLConnection.