Bill,
Thankyou. I /really/ appreciate the thoughtful and comprehensive response.
Knowing that it isn't an arbitrary separation or necessarily a desired
one helps a huge amount, turning it from something very discouraging
into an irritation to be worked around. Working for a small company,
it's easy to forget how slow, conservative and bureaucratic things can
get in large organisations. It's easy to see the people you're dealing
directly with as having a say in how things work - even though in a big
org, they often don't.
I wonder how many people are aware of the reasons for the split? I've
seen a lot of remarks about unhappiness re the users/experts split in
the JCP WGs without stumbling across the rather significant details in
your post.
As for the EG: It's something I've been considering as I get more
involved, but have been somewhat daunted by. I'm very happy to
contribute where I can, but I'm in no sense an expert; my primary
interest is in the real-world quality and usability of EE for
end-developers, users, and deployers of applications. Frankly, the main
value I have is that I'm a /non-expert/ - I have quite a fresh and
evolving memory of the experience of learning EE and the challenges of
developing with it as "just another developer". I've committed a lot of
time to writing up and pushing issues, instead of just hacking around
them and carrying on as I suspect the vast majority of EE devs must do
to get their projects out the door. That's given me a real interest in
the usability and quality of EE, but not necessarily any significant
amount of expertise.
If I can be of more benefit by applying to the EG then I'm certainly
willing to give that a go. I'll have to start diving through the JCP
verbiage to see.
BTW, the JSR 221 JDBC spec - quite a significant one for Java EE and
Java in general - is still on JCP 2.7 and it has no public java.net
site, EG list archives, etc. I've seen some frustration about that on
the PostgreSQL JDBC mailing lists. Given that JDBC 4.1 appears to be
planned for EE 7, do you know if there are plans afoot to bring JDBC
over to JCP 2.8?
--
Craig Ringer
On 07/26/2012 01:24 PM, Bill Shannon wrote:
> Hi Craig. I'm always amazed at some of the bizarre mailers people use, and
> some of the strange ways they use them. I can't explain why these things
> are happening, nor why people are doing them.
>
> I know the setup isn't as nice as we would like. We've asked for some
> improvements in the mail system infrastructure but the team that owns it
> is hesitant to do anything that's not critical because they plan to
> replace the entire mail infrastructure to solve some other problems.
> No, I don't know when that might happen nor whether it might address
> any of our particular problems.
>
> Sadly, one of the reasons we have two lists is due to advice from our
> lawyers. Contributions from expert group members are under the terms
> of the JSPA, but contributions from the public are under the terms of
> use for java.net. The two lists are an attempt to provide some
> separation. I'm sure you can point out all sorts of ways in which it's
> not perfect, but try explaining that to lawyers! :-)
>
> Given the constraints we're operating under, we've done the best we can
> to provide a setup that allows and encourages participation from the
> public. And of course, if you still feel like you're on the outside,
> you might consider joining the expert group. We're always looking for
> people like you to provide a different perspective.
>
> Anyway, thanks for your contributions so far. I'm hoping to get caught
> up on some of the recent discussions and have more to say about them
> tomorrow.