Benefits of JSR standards

Interview with Mark Little, CTO of JBoss, a division of Red Hat

We asked Mark Little about how Red Hat is a leading force for open standards, and about the role the JBoss Community and JBoss Enterprise Middleware play in promoting them.

Q: Please tell a little bit about yourself, your job title, and what projects you are currently involved in?

A: I'm Dr Mark Little and I'm in charge of the JBoss Division of Red Hat. Prior to this I was in charge of the JBoss SOA Platform as well as Director of Standards. I've been a Distinguished Engineer at HP as well as director of several successful start-ups. I'm a co-authors of many middleware standards, such as those in WS-*, OMG and JCP. I'm also co-author of various books on fault tolerant distributed systems.

Q: What are JSRs?

A: Java Specification Requests (JSRs) are the actual descriptions of proposed and final specifications for the Java platform. At any one time there are numerous JSRs moving through the review and approval process on Java Community Process (JCP.org) web site.

There are JSRs for all aspects of the Java Enterprise Standards, including transactions (JTA), JSR 299 (formerly known as WebBeans), EJB3 etc.

Q: How do standards benefit users? What problems will it solve?

A: Standards are great at providing a level playing field for different vendors and easing customer migrations from one vendor to another. Effectively, standards enhance the competition in any given market.

In a consolidated market, vendors do not see a benefit in open standards, because their main focus is on maximizing profit.

A level playing field only helps the competitors to win market share, and easy migration is certainly not in the interest of any given vendor either. Having stronger competition will reduce the margins, and so the vendors have a counter-incentive to use open standards and compete.

Lack of commonly-shared open standards provides vendors with a stable market and thus a stable revenue stream. Prices remain high and service quality and innovation remain minimal.

Users can only lose under these conditions, suffering from reduced innovation, reduced quality of service, and higher prices. In addition, as vendors move further away from each other, any new product purchased from a given vendor's stack further locks the customer in, making migration more and more expensive.

In such a world, every step forward is a step backward!

Sadly, we are seeing a consolidation going on in the Java market right now. Just look at the numbers: With each new version of J2EE we have fewer and fewer vendors in the market:

J2EE 1.2 : 18 vendors
J2EE 1.3 : 22 vendors
J2EE 1.4 : 17 vendors
EE 5 : 10 vendors

The side effect of this is that pricing and packaging structures used in those consolidated markets bend otherwise sound architectural decisions, causing unnecessary complexity of deployment, pricing, etc. This is the same issue we had in the early days of EE. Do we really want to go there again?

The trend is alarming. The number of JSRs started in the Java Community Process has steadily fallen as more consolidation has taken place. The number went from 61 new JSRs in 2001 to mere three in 2008.

Opposed to the proprietary model, open source thrives on open standards. Open standards level the playing field and open source is good at serving the new markets this creates. WebBeans and EE5 are a good example of an open standard that has gained wide adoption through open source.

Q: How will JBoss developers and customers see these benefits? (project & product view)

A: Developers get access to the standards as we develop them through the community releases, which happen regularly. They also have a good way of influencing these standards by giving us feedback on what they like and don't in our implementations. Of course customers then get the benefit of productized open source implementations.

Q: How did you get involved in this effort? What have you done so far?

A: I've been involved with standards since the early 1990s where I got involved with defining the OMG's Object Transaction Service standard. Since then I've co-authored other standards in the OMG and JCP, but primarily within the Web Services arena.

Q: Where can I learn more about JSR standards?

A: You can find many great articles about our leadership in the Java Community Process linked from this page http://www.jboss.com/company/leadership