Scott Dietzen, BEA chief technology officer, told Sun’s JavaOne conference last week: For the first time, we’d like to go on the record in favor of open sourcing J2SE, and we’ve been working behind the scenes on this.
J2SE, or Java 2 Standard Edition, is Sun’s desktop platform and runtime environment that contains many of the elements of Java 2 Enterprise Edition used on servers such as Enterprise Java Beans. Sun, and the Java Community Process, are working towards the latest edition of J2SE: version 5.0.
Open sourcing J2SE would potentially help in the delivery of bug fixes for Sun’s Technology Compatibility Kits, Dietzen said. TCKs are a suite of tests, tools and documentation used by vendors to determine whether or not their product complies with official JCP standards.
TCKs are currently updated through the JCP, a process some in the community regard as too lengthy. We’d like to see more open sourcing of TCKs, Dietzen said. He also suggested that the open source community could help to speed up the introduction of changes designed to make Java simpler to use for non-Java programmers currently using other languages like C/C++, PHP, and Python.
We can be doing a lot more if the Java community was reaching out to the PHP, Python, and C/C++ [developers]… this should be our home court. We shouldn’t be seeding it to someone else, Dietzen said.
He appeared to be making a reference to Microsoft Corp and .NET, which provides a cross-language framework for C/C++, Python and other Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages through the Common Language Runtime.
Numerous efforts are underway across the Java community, and by individual vendors, to simplify programming in Java. Sun’s own Java Studio Creator launched last week uses drag-and-drop development and will help grow the community of Java developers to 10 million, according to Sun.
