A tidbit from Friday, reported by Alex Miller, gave me a bit of whiplash: Stanley Ho, Sun’s spec lead for the modularity-focused JSR 277, is leaving to go to RIM, and the job is being taken over by Alex Buckley, who’s long had his toe in the Java modularity waters with JSR 294. Waitaminute, I thought: does this mean that the language’s two uneasily coexisting modularity proposals were merging? Is it the triumph of OSGi? Ha ha, silly me, getting my numbers mixed up: the JSR for implementing OSGi as part of the Java language is JSR 291. So, there will still be two different modularity proposals, which will end up being compatible, sometime before they’re released, we hope. For more on the two proposals’ differences and overlaps, check out Jeff Hanson’s excellent JavaWorld article on the subject from August. JSR 294 is still yet another modularity whosit. Still, I suppose this is a step forward. No word on the reason behind Ho’s departure, but it’s worth noting that he was involved in an odd little episode in June where he showed up in person to talk to a blogger who had criticized JSR 277. It will be interesting to see if Buckley will take a different tack with the controversy around the JSR 277 versioning scheme. Java