Java SE 7 Finally Approved By JCP, 13 To 1 101
medv4380 writes with news from InfoWorld about the near-term future of Java: "Java Platform, SE (Standard Edition) 7 has been passed this week by the JCP Executive Committee for SE/EE (Enterprise Edition), by a vote of 13 in favor and 1 — Google — against. Oracle, IBM, VMware, Red Hat, and Fujitsu are among the affirmative votes, and two committee members — Credit Suisse and Java architect Werner Keil — did not vote. Specifically, committee members voted on Java Specification Request 336, which pertains to the Java upgrade. Voting on the public review ballot for Java SE 7 finished up earlier this week after beginning on May 31. Java SE 7 still faces another vote on a final approval ballot."
Java is Doomed (Score:2, Interesting)
It is symptomatic of the JCP (Java *Community* Process -- in reality run by a committe of about a dozen international corporations) that is filled with bureaucracy and childish infighting. IMHO the writing is on the wall for Java because stuff moves way to slowly. Java has JPA which would have been a really nice ORM... about five years ago but technology moves faster than that. Compare that to C# whose development process is entirely controlled by a single company and you have Linq2Sql and the Entity Framework. There is more api churn, but at least stuff is moving forward.
It was especially apparent with J2ME which went from market leader to an also ran player. All the companies invested in Java tried to stab each other in the back and abused the JCP to gain advantages on each other. The way several of the mobile JSR:s were specified, weren't so much dependent on what would be the best technical decisions but on compromises intended to make everyone happy and not give the market leader (who already had a working reference implementation) an edge. That's why some of the JSR:s are so bizarre such as the Mobile Sensor api.
To bad, I say. The Java platform had so much potential that will go to waste. It would have been hard enough for Java to complete if the CLR wasn't superior technology, but it is. The future looks fairly bleak for Linux on the server side without a competitive virtual machine.