Welcome to the August edition of the JCP column! This month I'll cover a few J2ME-related JSRs and two new JSRs in the J2SE/J2EE environment, but first out of the block is the program office's own JSR, number 215.

Further Evolving Rules of the Community
JSR 215 aims to deliver several changes to the rules of the JCP to make the process more open and transparent, both to members and to the general public. These changes should make it easier to determine how a JSR is doing and what the expert group is working on. The plan is to make all draft reviews publicly visible, including the Community Review. The JSR may also introduce the spec lead's choice to have its JSR assigned to both ECs instead of the ME EC or the SE/EE EC. And finally, JSR 215 outlines default requirements for TCKs at the Final Approval Ballot. If all goes well from the time of my writing, JSR 215 should be in Community Review and you should be able to view and provide feedback on the draft process document at http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/215.jsp. The Executive Committee members and I are very interested in hearing your opinions on these proposals.

The J2ME Environment
In the J2ME environment there are a couple of items of note to share with you. JSR 185 successfully passed its Final Approval Ballot. The goal of the JTWI specification is to improve the compatibility, interoperability, and completeness of J2ME technology implementations in mobile phones. The JSR minimizes API fragmentation and raises the bar of functionality for high volume devices in this market.

Nokia has submitted a new JSR that aims to deliver an optional API for scalable 2D vector graphics. Two examples of target use for the API are map visualization and scalable icons. JSR 226 plans to support the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format and is aimed at an MIDP 2.0 environment.

Since the time of writing of last month's column, several J2ME-related JSRs faced reconsideration ballots (JSRs 177, 216, 217, 218, 219). Each JSR successfully passed the ballot, meaning they are approved to progress to the next step in the process. If you're interested in the comments submitted by EC members while voting, visit a JSR's page on JCP.org and click on the ballot link in the status table.

On to the J2SE and J2EE Environments
The last few weeks saw the submission of two new JSRs, one by Oracle and one jointly by Oracle and IBM.

JSR 225, XQuery API for Java, will enable a Java application to submit XQuery queries to an XML data source and process the results of such queries. XQuery is an effort by the W3C XML Query Language Group. While there are APIs such as JDBC, JDO, and RowSets to process relational data, there is no common API to query XML data.

JSR 227, submitted by Oracle, is titled "A standard data access and data binding facility for J2EE". This proposal introduces declarative bindings, a framework of classes that formalize the typical interactions between UI components and the values and methods available on Business Services so that any Java UI rendering technology can declaratively bind to these services. A Business Service is a Java class that publishes and manipulates the objects that represent an enterprise application's persistent data sources.

JavaOne Conference Postscript
The JCP program was quite active at this year's conference. At the "Java Communities in Action" event where you could compare and contrast JINI, JXTA, and the JCP, the program office handed out the first JCP awards. The EC members voted Nokia the Most Innovative J2ME JSR for JSR 184, BEA the Most Innovative J2SE/J2EE JSR for JSR 207, and Jim Van Peursem of Motorola the Best Spec Lead. Jim is the spec lead for JSR 118, an expert group of 60+ companies with more than 120 persons participating, and the JSR still delivered!

During the conference I did the usual number of press interviews. In closing, I'll share with you my favorite question from one of these interviews: "Now that Java has Web services APIs, why do you still have RMI?"

That's it for this month. I am very interested in your feedback. Please e-mail me with your comments, questions, and suggestions.