10.7.05

Is JSR 250 already mature?

As discussed earlier in a more general manner, I have the feeling that JSR 250 is away from a publishable form. Here are some of my concrete suggestions on how to pimp up the current paper released on June, 21st. I already sent them to the JSR commission as an RTF-document containing of several pages:
  1. Define what the JSR 250 really is about. There is no commen consensus about which aspects should be covered by the common annotations to be defined in JSR 250.
  2. I suggest including only annotations that have a generic character and support concerns of common interest that are not too complex (if they were they could be part of a separate JSR).
  3. Group annotations: It should be quite obvious how to group the currently defined annotations in the public review paper. This should be a first and easy step getting a better feeling on where the journey goes.
  4. Context-free aspects that could be covered by annotations could be:
  • Design Patterns, especially the topics
    • name of the pattern
    • role within a design pattern
    • description of the pattern itself and of its roles
  • Design by Contract-related issues
  • Architectural layers, such as (just to give an idea)
    • persistence
    • persistence mapping
    • interfaces to third-party systems
    • business logic
    • domain logic
    • transportation / protocols
    • view mapping
    • view logic
    • display

The current version of the JSR 250 public review seems not adequate for manifesting or extending it in a way that it is displaying when reading it. As I suggested, there should be a general refurbishment of the whole paper. We are far from looking at if a single annotation proposed by the JSR’s expert group is useful, should contain additional information or should be renamed.

The problem is of more principle nature: The goal should be defined in round terms, a firm stand should be taken, context-free (or, say, generic) annotations should be considered instead of special ones and the direct support for J2EE specifics should be reconsidered.

Interesting resources:

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