The JCP Executive Committee meets once a month to discuss topics of relevance to the Java platform and its community. Being a group of 25 members distributed around the world the preferred option for these meetings is the remote one, however the EC comes together 3 times a year to meet face-to-face, the first of these meetings just happened a few days ago at IBM's campus in Hursley, UK.
First day of the January #JCP EC meeting hosted by @IBM in Hursley pic.twitter.com/ZoUVpJn1mv
— JCP (@jcp_org) January 30, 2018
This was my second meeting as part of the JCP EC but the first where I was able to meet and greet other members of the group; I was happy to see some familiar faces though as I'm just getting started. We had a full day and a half worth of time to discuss several topics, the minutes will be available at the following link in the coming days. This being said, there were 3 time slots where JSR Spec leads made a presentation on their respective JSRs, which were:
- JSR-371 MVC 1.0 - by Ivar Grimstad (@ivar_grimstad)
- JSR-382 Java Config - by Emily Jiang (@emilyfhjiang)
- JSR-385 Units Of Measurement 2.0 - by Werner Keil (@wernerkeil)
Those interested in MVC 1.0 should know that the JSR has posted its first Public Draft Review, you can read more about it here. As an additional treat we got to wander around the museum in Hursley House. The museum is filled with lots of hardware and memorabilia developed by IBM through the years, such as the Winchester drive, a name that became synonym for hard drives at the time and yes, it was named as such because it was developed at that particular campus (Hursley is a stone throw away from Winchester). There were AIX workstations, AS/400, hard drives of all sizes (physical and storage), chips, ATMs, clocks, and more. That was a fun experience as I've got to geek out with others while we reminisced on the hardware we worked with at earlier stages of our careers and even earlier.
Later on Wednesday we had a chance to mingle with members of the London Java Community at an event titled "Java 9 and beyond: Meet the Java Community Process Executive Committee". It was another great experience as we broke into smaller groups after an introduction, 2 to 3 EC members per group, rotating among groups every 20 minutes or so. Surprisingly many attendees were not aware of the new release cycle that Oracle has put forward for OpenJDK, nor that Java 9 and Java 10 (coming out next month) are not considered as long time support releases. And that's precisely why we where there, to share news and information, to gather feedback from the community, to help and to learn.
@jcp_org these guys awesome. Learned a lot from them. Do these events more often. pic.twitter.com/1VNnGBeahT
— Ali E (@AliEbadian) January 31, 2018
All in all it was a great week, very much looking forward to the next opportunity. If any JUG would like to host such a meeting in the future do get in touch with the JCP EC at @jcp_org, we're here to make sure Java continues to move forward, we do so with everyone's involvement.