The Cathedral, the Bazaar and the Commissar: The Evolution of Innovation in Enterprise Java
Now that enterprise Java has passed its 10 year anniversary it's timely to examine the story of innovation in the platform--a story of dramatic change.
In the beginning, vendors built proprietary products such as TopLink that helped to define important functionality, in a traditional "cathedral" model. Open source had little influence on enterprise Java. The emergence of the JCP as the dominant influence on programming model and infrastructure design changed things dramatically. By 2000, J2EE had largely replaced proprietary models as a strategic solution. This grew the market greatly and firmly established enterprise Java, but proved unsuccessful as a source of innovation--indeed, sometimes to stifle innovation. From 2002, open source solutions began to drive innovation in enterprise Java, helping to improve the platform and make users more successful.
Today all three forces of innovation (commercial, JCP and open source) remain important, but the lines are increasingly blurred. Standards create markets; markets enable a flowering of open source; open source in turn influences standards and sometimes supplants standards; the JCP is no longer the sole significant standards body; proprietary software vendors still flourish in some areas; and there are many commercial offerings around open source. Market leading products reflect the influence of all three forces of innovation.
In this session, Rod Johnson provides an opinionated view of the story of enterprise Java innovation, what it teaches us about the wider industry and the lessons we should consider when making technology choices.
Review:
Rod Johnson talks about lessons that can be learned from the history of Java, sources of innovation and how innovation can shape the future of Java and save it from becoming the next Cobol.
Creativity, experimentation, competition and economic motivation are strong drivers for innovation. The history of enterprise Java can be examined in four eras, which are: Movement of focus from applets to server side Java, Java Community Process dominated era, decline of J2EE solutions and rise of open source solutions. In the early days, source of innovation was mostly various vendors.
After around 1999, the Java Community Process became dominant, acting as a sheriff that decided who should stay in the market (town) and who should leave. Even though this produced some good results - like creation of standardisation like servlets and creation of a market - it had also produced some dramatic effects on innovation. For example imposing standardisation for some technologies, like the Java Persistence API, killed innovation.
After 2002, a move towards open source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate started. Also, Tomcat became the most popular application platform. In this new era, open source communities started to become the source of innovation. One example of this is the Eclipse community providing plug-ins and AspectJ became the definitive AOP solution.
“The cathedral” and “The bazaar” terms were introduced by Eric Reymond to define different open source software development models. Rod Johnson talks about each model and explains why he thinks that the bazaar model falls short on defining the current situation of the open source community. Later he explains his ideas of modelling and introduces the Commissar model.
None of the models is solely sufficient for innovation. Both vendors, JCP and the open source community have important roles in sustaining innovation. We must be sure to avoid standards restricting new technologies entering the market. JCP should not resemble he former USSR in dictating technologies. A new wave of innovation is shifting to the open source community. Furthermore, Rod believes that individuals and end users can and should take more responsibility in determining the future of enterprise Java.
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Review by Eren Aykin
ABOUT ROD JOHNSON
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Rod is the father of Spring. The Spring Framework open source project began in February 2003, based on SpringSource's Spring framework published with Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development.
Rod is one of ...
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PODCAST THE CATHEDRAL, THE BAZAAR AND THE COMMISSAR: THE EVOLUTION OF INNOVATION IN ENTERPRISE JAVA
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