Even a chimp can write code

Friday, August 13, 2004

BEA and IBM Joint Specifications, anyone?

While the skeptic in me is quick to jump and shout "circumventing the Java Community Process!", I see some value in the new specifications made available royalty-free by BEA and IBM this week. From the lofty goals of the Service Data Objects, to Work Managers and Timers which will solve real world problems of threading, concurrency and scheduling in managed environments, these joint specifications do cover ground. Seemingly the intent is to encourage the developer community to evaluate them and provide feedback before the JCP ratifies them.

That summary probably gave away my bias. That I'd like to have my enterprise code initiate concurrent requests to disparate backend systems without relying on JMS. That I'd like to schedule tasks without doing anything illegal within a container. I am currently reading the 'Timer and Work Manager for Application Servers' specification. My only problem is that I cannot wait until WebSphere 6 or 7 comes out with these features. My problems exist today and I've had to use alternatives I don't particularly fancy.

See this and this from the CommonJ initiative.

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