William Vambenepe's blog

The Public Review Ballot for JSR #262 that took place in the Executive Committee for SE/EE has closed. I am not familiar enough with the JCP process to know exactly what this milestone represents. But the results are interesting in any case.

The vote narrowly passed with 6 yes, 5 no and 1 abstain.

The overiding concern listed by the “no” voters (and several of the “yes” voters) is the fact that JSR262 uses WS-Management (a DMTF standard) which itself makes use of specifications that have been submitted to W3C but are not currently in the process of standardization (WS-Transfer, WS-Eventing, WS-Enumeration). And that it uses an older version of a now-standard specification (WS-Addressing).

SAP makes the most insightful comment: that this is not really a JCP problem but a DMTF problem. Hopefully the DMTF (and Microsoft, since it controls the fate of the specifications in question) will step up to the plate on this. This is likely to happen. Even if the DMTF and Microsoft didn’t care about making the JCP happy (but they do, don’t they?), they will run into similar issues if/when they push WS-Management towards ANSI/ISO standardization.

Next to this “non-standard dependencies” issue, there is only one technical issue mentioned. As you guessed, it’s IBM whining about the lack of a WSDL to feed their tools. This is becoming so repetitive that I may eventually stop making fun of it (but don’t hold your breath, I am not known for being very good at ending long-running jokes). It is pretty ironic to hear IBM claim that without that WSDL you can’t implement the spec on JAX-WS when you know that the wiseman reference implementation by Sun and HP is based on JAX-WS…

Having been a alternate board member at WS-I, a committee co-chair at OASIS and at some point closely involved in W3C and DMTF working groups, I’ve had my share of dealing with standards organizations rules, bylaws and policies. All these organizations try to find a balance between openness/fairness on one end of the scale and efficiency/consistency/vision on the other. But all those are industry standard organizations and I have been spared the need to deal with the internals of the even more complex and bureaucratic “de jure” organizations like ISO/IEC. Those who follow the OOXML/ODF debate remember the often-alleged, never-denied (that I have seen) and ultimately unsuccesful attempt to stack the deck in favor of Microsoft’s OOXML by convincing a large number of new countries to join the vote at the last minute. Andy Updegrove now describes a probably unanticipated (let’s not be too cynical) consequence of this attempt: these new members don’t really understand or care about the work going on in SC 34 and their non-participation is preventing the group from making any progress due to the need to have a participation rate of at least 50% in the votes. And this is impacting many other specifications not related to OOXML (including, ironically, Schematron which is a dependency for the Microsoft-backed SML specification).

If this was OASIS, these countries would loose their voting status after failing to participate (if only by voting “abstain”) in a certain number of votes. But I don’t know if such minimum participation rules exist as a safety feature in ISO.

After the attempt to seize control, here is the halting of the work. Deletion is the logical next step in the ctrl-alt-del pattern that seems to be emerging…