Sun, JCP, & Jigsaw

Blogger: Kirk Knoernschild

Recently, Sun announced Project Jigsaw, an effort to modularize JDK 7, within the OpenJDK community. Neil Bartlett posted an interesting perspective on Jigsaw, and noted that:

"Jigsaw will be fully supported by Sun, although it is not an official Java standard backed by a JSR"

This is certainly a troubling approach taken by Sun. Without question, the tangled history of OSGi and JSR 294 has been interesting. But the industry has already decided that OSGi is the de facto standard for modularity on the Java platform, with most vendors baking OSGi into their products. And OSGi is supported by an official JSR 291.

While Jigsaw is not part of Java SE 7 (yet), Sun must tread carefully. By lending full support to Project Jigsaw, they are giving indication of their willingness to bypass the JCP when they deem necessary.  This move stands to undermine the JCP entirely, and serves notice that if Sun decides to move in a different direction, they reserve that right.