Java EE Guardians Achieve Partial Success

Today The Register reports that Oracle committed itself to sustained maintenance of Java EE. This is clearly (but possibly not uniquely) a partial success to the Java EE Guardians initiative. Hooray! 🙂 Nevertheless, as Oracle employees told me in private, this does not necessarily means to really develop Java EE any further, or in any particular direction… So the Guardians will keep up their Monitoring of Oracle’s actual next steps. Anyways I wonder how Oracle will be able to finish Java EE in time. They say they can deliver Java EE 8 early in 2017, but according to the rules of the JCP (number of steps and time Frames) and looking at the current state of some JSRs (like 370 / JAX-RS 2.1) I doubt that this will be possible in time without violating the rules of the JCP. My fear is that either Oracle will simply declare the current state (hence: rather zero) as “Java EE 8” or simply ignore other Stakeholders and declare their own products as “Java EE 8”. I shouldn’t wonder about the latter, as Oracle recently (possibly frequently) ignored JCP rules, e. g. by simply being unresponsive to EG members, dictating results without asking EG members about their opinion, or just ignoring the JCP timeframes without any shame.