Well, lets just say i do have the capacity to move past financial news and make some comments on something that is going right at Sun: of course I am talking about the impending release of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (JEE6), as this seems to be the only thing that is consistently executing in a leadership position right now, and that includes the competition with Spring and .Net…there is not much in the way of comparing JEE6 with Spring 2.5/3x and .Net 2/3x, as they are each fulfilling their own niche, so i won’t do that justice, i’ll leave it to a discussion on TSS to vet that one out, but I will talk about what Enterprise Java means to Sun’s overall business, as I have made some references to it in previous posts…For your background reference, details about the JEE6 platform can be found here:https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=316 There are a lot of big questions remaining over what this release will actually deliver on: with JEE3, there were some JAX web services integration via the Web Services Pack; JEE4 formalized that JAX integration; and JEE5 re-wrote the EJB and JPA specs to make it more viable to more developers…now, with a focus on making JEE6 more palatable to more developers, especially at the “web-tier”, there is this thing called profiles that is being introduced:i think this is a mistake, but i have been wrong before, and do not feel like fighting it, in the limited scope of what such a protest would make…essentially, profiles means that after years of arguing with my former colleagues at Sun about calling the Sun Web Server a ‘light-weight’ application server because it served up JSPs and Servlets, that is exactly what the JEE6 expert committee is about to certify, with the real significance being that Tomcat will be able to call itself “JEE-compatible”, as will the Spring Application Platform…why is this important? well, to state the obvious, it destroys the very value proposition that made JEE the de-facto Internet application development paradigm, as customers faced a far-less costly portability exercise…for instance, develop a JEE application in Glassfish, with or without EJBs, and there is no explicit guarantee that it will work with other so-called application servers, as it is up to the vendor to determine which ‘profile’ to support… why would the expert committee shirk its main responsibility of providing a standard specification that allows for full compatibility with Java? arguments have come from far and wide, and i wouldn’t mind hearing them again, as i don’t get them, and i even boil it down to a political manoeuvre to splinter the JEE market…is this paranoia? perhaps, but i have yet to hear a valid argument that dispels this possibility…o.k., so with profiles, you can supposedly write a standard servlet and have it run cross-platform, and perhaps this weird-thing called ‘EJB-lite’ might apply to this principle as well…but anything that Sun’s main customer base is going to do with JEE, in particular banks and telecos, will be utilizing enterprise features such as JPA, JAX, and even full EJB – – what then? it is up to the development team to choose what works best for them, but for the platform architects, a much more informed analysis is needed to know what will be essentially “standard” and what will be a profile…why is this good? as stated, the argument is that more developers (meaning more novice developers) will be able to utilize the power of JEE…as u may have gathered, i am less than convinced that this will result in better options, in fact it may force developers to move to a more standard specification in the form of Spring, as at least they will know what is coming, what is portable, and what platforms support it…and this really comes back to Sun…what on planet earth is going on at the company? I have been pretty clear about my lack of support for openSolaris as a driver of Sun’s business; in fact, it is JEE that is the driver of Sun’s business, as Enterprise Java deployments are custom-made for the T2 hardware business, and have additionally been the mainstay of Sun’s revenue for the past decade…why splinter this effort? I know that the JCP is a ‘community’ process, but there has to be a reason why Sun has resisted completely turning over the direction and final decision-making in favor of having final veto…my thinking is that the veto might be best used to strike down the profile effort, even as it would result in an unprecedented uproar from many of the JCP’s most prominent members…or would it? SpringSource would be upset and would more vigorously disparage EJB and also to JEE, to a certain extent; Oracle and IBM may be upset with Sun’s heavy-handedness this late in the stage of development of JEE6, and Apache would of course be up-in-arms (for something other than licensing this time), but really who would be affected by this: so-called developers who are waiting in the wings for profiles? i doubt it…I am nearly sick of hearing myself think about the lack of management savvy at Sun, and it would seem that the executive team has more pressing things to worry about, such as a diving stock price, and a diminishing installed base, but it would signal to the Java marketplace, that compatibility, portability, and ultimately, re-use are the driving forces behind JEE; with profiles, this argument may die…i am a bit on the tip of being negative about everything coming out of Santa Clara right now, and i am not convinced that JEE6 is the area where concentration should be directed… but i do know that JEE6 is important, Glassfish is vital, and the Java developer community is the only constituency sticking it out with Sun, so perhaps some leadership would be welcome…I don’t know what else to do about this company, it is so severely entrenched in myopia that i cant imagine what meetings are about except the day-to-day tactical initiative to keep customers from jumping ship, but somewhere, at some point, a decision will have to be made to release JEE6…considering the inability to get anything else right, maybe this is a good, safe place to start: eliminate profiles and market JEE with Glassfish as the whole center of the business, i can’t see something else with more upside, i am open to alternative suggestions… Java