In a fascinating article over at Internet.com, Calvin Austin - member of JDJ's distinguished editorial advisory panel, has been commenting on the news that three members of the 14-strong Java Specification Request-176 (JSR) committee that approved "Tiger" this month in fact had reservations: they wanted J2SE 1.5 to have more CORBA support.

"Lots of companies have their own CORBA ORBs and CORBA technology," Austin told Internet.com's reporter Jim Wagner.

"We have a fully-compliant ORB essentially," said Austin, "and it's really about what is added to it. For interoperability, we can actually work with other ORBs, which works out great and we have an endorsed standards mechanism."

But IBM, BEA, and Hewlett-Packard apparently all wanted more, going along with the unanimous committee vote only so that the release of "Tiger" suffered no delay.

Here's how Wagner's report explains what Austin said will happen in the near future:

For the committee working on the specification, [Austin] said, it was a question of how much CORBA support do you natively support before it's too much?

"It's a gray area, you obviously want to put as much in without jeopardizing the platform," Austin said. "[CORBA's] always being incremented, always being added, we just need to find out what parts (to add) and where."

Based on the feedback received in the 90 days from the release of the public review, JSR-176 committee members will make modifications to J2SE 1.5 and publish a final review. It's likely changes to CORBA support will be made at that time, Austin said.

 

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