Attending Java Licensee Day is one of many benefits of being a full Java Licensee. Attendees get an advance peak at the Roadmap for Java Technology and access to the people helping to create it. My personal role in this last point was to participate in the Ask the Experts panel along with Rajiv Mordani, Ken Drachnick, Roberto Chinicci, Eduardo Pellegri-Llopart, Bill Shannon, Paul Sterk, and one other gentleman whom I didn't know whose name escapes me. I guess J2EE licensees aren't a chatty lot so during a dry-spell I took the opportunity to ask the assembled licensees, who pay some good dough to sport the J2EE brand, "are your customers clamoring for a light weight framework, like Spring"? Only Barry Coleman of ATG replied, and they said yes, but they feel their product entry in this space, which has been around much longer than Spring, is better. I was surprised at the lack of response to this question, given the buzz in the blogosphere about Spring.

At the reception, I met with Steve Montal and Sam Heisz of Caucho Technologies, maker of Resin. I explained one value add of JCP membership to them: the ability to shape the platform and demonstrate thought leadership to their customers. It says something to a customer when you can point to an important feature in Java and say, "See that feature? That's us." Learned they definately plan to implement JSP 2.1, but no plans for JSF. By way of persuading them to provide another clean-room JSF impl, I told them that if they implemented JSP 2.1, they'd have a good part of the battle for JSF 1.2 done. Their main concern with the design of JSF is their misunderstanding that you must use the session for state saving. I corrected this misunderstanding and said that they could take the Sun RI (which they're totally legally entitled to do as Java EE Licensees) and simply replace the state saving impl with their own.

Personal notes at my sun.com blog.

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