The Java Community Process (JCP) program doesn't succeed just because lots of smart engineers are working diligently to come up with specifications. Like an ocean liner navigating turbulent waves, the program requires a strong rudder to cut through the up and down, supply and demand of the industry.
There are actually two major industry spheres for the JCP standards body to navigate: the Java Standard Edition/Enterprise Edition (SE/EE) and the Java Micro Edition (ME). The two Executive Committees (ECs) each comprise fifteen voting members who hold three-year terms for 10 ratified seats and 5 elected seats, plus permanent member Sun Microsystems. EC members provide the overseeing guidance for developing Java Specification Requests (JSRs) that are relevant, useful, and necessary for each sphere of industry.
To weather inevitable storms, ship rudders need regular maintenance. The SE/EE EC and the ME EC go through a six-week election process each year. Each Autumn, one-third of the EC terms expire. Eligible candidates for the EC may be companies, organizations, or individuals.
Of the 865 eligible voters in the JCP program as of October 2006, more than one-fourth participated in the vote to ratify the Program Management Office (PMO) nominations. The PMO has a pretty clear view of who?s who in the JCP community. They work through the application process with new members, interact with Spec Leads and EC members on a regular basis, and notice who is serving on Expert Groups. Their nominations take into account the need for a balanced community and representation from a plurality of regions.
The PMO nominated IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu Limited for the ratification ballot. The nominees needed only a simple majority of votes to be ratified by the community, in the election, all four were judged worthy by an overwhelming 80 percent of the voters. These four members are now re-elected on the EC,for another three-years term.
Representing IBM on the EC, Mark Thomas leads the development teams in providing IBM software developer kits for Java technology. His development experience includes graphics, windowing systems, message queuing, computer-aided telephony, voice response systems, print and printer management, embedded controllers, and Java technologies.
Don Deutsch, who serves Oracle on the EC and other standards boards, was the 2002 recipient of the Edward Lohse Information Technology Medal for his leadership of national and international information technology standardization Scott Jameson, representing Hewlett-Packard on the EC and other standards organizations, is currently chairman of ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information Technology.
Masahiko Narita of Fujitsu Limited serves as primary representative on the EC. He has actively promoted object technology in the Japanese market, particularly in leading cross-vendor Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), SOAP, and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)/Transaction interoperability test through the Distributed Object Promotion Group (DOPG).
After the ratification, just one seat on the SE/EE EC remained vacant. For such open seats, any JCP member who has signed the Java Specification Participation Agreement 2 (JSPA 2) can nominate themselves or others. During the ten-day open nominations period, a record number of individual names -- six! -- were nominated to the SE/EE EC, along with one corporation. The winner with the most votes was Doug Lea.
The runners up:
- Capgemini, one of the largest full-service IT providers, employs thousands of Java developers. The company joined the JCP community in 2004, served actively on the Java EE 5 and Java SE 6 Expert Groups, and supported the Java Portlet specification and the release of JBI.
- Tom Crosman understands the history, current status, and future potential of Java technology, having worked full-time on it since the launch of JDK 1.0.1. He has commented on JSRs and voted in JCP elections.
- Jean-Marie Dautelle is an individual developer with strong affiliations and contributions to open-source projects. More about Jean-Marie as winner of the ME EC race.
- Justen M. Stepka worked with a team to develop, market, and support the IDX sign-on and identity management framework when he was CEO of Authentisoft, recently purchased by Atlassian. He is a contributing author for O'Reilly and other popular publications and a speaker at JUGs and TheServerSide.com conferences.
- Evan Summers is a Java developer working on foundation classes to reuse in future projects and applications, possibly involving Swing clients using RESTful web services. He currently participates in JSR 295, Beans Binding, and JSR 296, Swing Application Framework.
- Mauro Do Valle was a JUG leader in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, for the last four years, doing many events and projects for the Java Community. He joined the JCP program as an individual three years ago.
And the winner:
Doug Lea, already an EC member, maintains his goal to ensure technical excellence and innovation in the core Java SE platform, partly through his service as Spec Leader or Expert on most JSRs dealing with core SE language and library specifications. He shoulders the effort to improve the openness and transparency of JCP processes. Doug represents the concerns of academics, researchers, and individual members in EC deliberations.
The other members of the SE/EE will continue to serve until their terms expire either in 2007 or 2008. They are Apache Software Foundation, BEA Systems, Borland, Google, Intel, Nortel Networks, Red Hat Middleware LLC, SAP, SAS Institute Inc., and Hani Suleiman.
More than 77 percent of the JCP voters ratified the PMO's ME EC nominees: Motorola, Vodafone Group Services Limited, Siemens AG, and BenQ Corporation.
Motorola's primary representative, James Warden has over 25 years of experience developing software and system architecture for mobile and embedded devices. He is the Maintenance Lead for JSR 118, Mobile Information Device Profile 2.0 (MIDP2), and has served on ten other Expert Groups.
Guenter Klas, representing Vodafone, leads the company's terminal standardization program, coordinates the efforts of Vodafone's Spec Leads and Experts, and through his team is involved in standards organizations such as the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), and Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP). Siemens AG is represented on the ME EC by Lothar Borrmann, who leads the Software Architecture department in assisting and advising Siemens' Groups regarding software architecture issues, innovations, and trends, including software platform technologies such as the Java technology. BenQ Corporation is in process of appointing a primary representative.
Two seats on the ME EC were up for open nomination. Three members were nominated: Jean-Marie Dautelle, who is also running for the SE/EE EC seat, Ericsson AB, and SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc. The two winners were Ericsson AB and Jean-Marie Dautelle.
The runner up:
Among the top ten fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley, California, SiRF is a market leader in location technologies and video for mobile handsets. With SiRF solutions based on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the company caters to an impressive roster of handset customers including Nokia, Motorola, SonyEricsson, Samsung, HTC, as well as large operator customers such as SK Telecom, Sprint-Nextel, DoCoMo, and Cingular. Within the JCP community, SiRF has actively participated in JSR 293, Location API 2.0; JSR 281, IMS Services API; and JSR 298, Telematics API for Java ME.
The winners:
- Ericsson AB is a strong advocate of open standards and interoperability, focused on defragmenting technology to enable more developers to reach mass market. Ericsson has been an active participant in many ground-breaking JSRs, including JSR 271, MIDP3; JSR 272, Mobile Broadcast Service API for Handheld Terminals; and JSR 300, DRM API for Java ME; and the developer-friendly JSR 281, IMS Services API. Magnus Olsson, of Ericsson Mobile Platforms, has already been representing Ericsson on the ME EC and as an active Expert Group member.
- Jean-Marie Dautelle is Java SE 5.0 Certified, the owner and primary developer of two popular open-source projects: Javolution (http://javolution.org) and JScience (http://jscience.org). JScience provides the current Reference Implementation for the Expert Group Jean-Marie serves on, JSR 275, Units Specification.
The other members on the ME EC are IBM, Intel, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Orange France, Philips, Research In Motion, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, and Sun Microsystems.
Incoming and outgoing EC members will change places in November and the new ECs will meet for the first time in December. With many interesting JSRs in the works and program initiatives in early stages, their term promises to be a busy one.
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