JSR 273 is born!

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

The
final vote
is in - and
JSR 273
has been born! The spec lead is my
colleague Joe Nuxoll, who also works on Creator. I
could have linked his name to his
blog here, but my
repeated
nudges for some blogging activity
don't seem to have any effect :-)

Briefly stated, the problem with the old JavaBeans spec is
that while it works, IDEs need a lot more information about
components - such as their context menus, etc., so every IDE
out there has gone and implemented their own abstraction on
top of JavaBeans. This means of course that components written
for one IDE don't work on another (or at least not the richer
integration aspects).

This JSR will address that, such that third party component
vendors (and open source developers) can write nice JavaServer Faces
components for one IDE and it will work nicely in other IDEs as well.

This JSR is near and dear to my heart. The Creator web page designer
(which I work on) deals with Joe's APIs heavily. For example, when
you drop a rowset from the Server navigator onto a dropdown,
there's no special knowledge in the designer about rowsets and
dropdowns. We simply rely on the enhanced component APIs to query
whether the target component accepts a link from the dropped component
and so on.

Now this is in the hands of the expert group and they'll start working
on a proposal. Perhaps it will be radically different from
what we've implemented in Creator today - but we'll track it and
make sure that down the road there's a strong component market place
on the Java platform.