JSRs JSRs JSRs

Seems like everyone is discussing the myriad of proposals to extend Java that are springing up all over the place. But there also is a lot of less glamorous work being done on improving library and framework support for Java developers. For starters, we have JSR-310 proposed by Stephen Colebourne and Michael Nascimento Santos to revamp the Date and Time APIs. Anyone who had the "opportunity" to use java.util.Calendar and java.util.Date is probably looking forward to a future where they won't have to worry about mutable Dates requiring defensive copying nor crazy 0-based month numbering. As an aside, I hope the EG take a good look at Eric Evans' Time and Money library for examples of well constructed value-object-style public interfaces.

Next, we see an early prototype of the Swing Application Framework available at java.net. This is a sample of the work being done on JSR-296 to ease common patterns encountered by Swing Rich Client application developers, like lifecycle control and Action management(including internationalization). And NetBeans support for this JSR is already under way.

Finally, Sun recently announced JSR-311, an effort to ease the development of RESTful Web Services in Java. It seems the REST community is very afraid of overarchitecting and frameworkitis, but interestingly, the initial skepticism quickly turned into a desire to help, with Mark Baker, Bill de hÓra and Stefan Tilkov applying for EC membership. I plan to watch this JSR with interst (and curiosity) in the coming months.

PS: I almost forgot... 1st post! (on my third blog...)