Coming soon?
"Will Java be standardised?" That was the question on everyone's lips at the recent ISO SC22 Java Study Group (JSG) meeting in Cu-pertino. Jim Mitchell, CEO of JavaSoft, ad-dressed the group and confirmed Sun's commitment to standardisation, saying they would move forward with standardisation when the specification was "cooked" but not before. He also noted that Sun were keen to retain the Java™ brand name. At present it is unclear what path such standardisation would take: ISO, ECMA or some sort of "fasttrack" based on published specifications.
JSG came to broad agreement that Sun should be invited to submit the Java technologies to ISO for standardisation by a single working group. That working group would operate under a strict charter to produce component standards as quickly as possible with the least possible changes to the published specifications. It is yet to be seen which way Sun will go.
JSG may meet in Silicon Valley at the end of April - this would coincide with a milestone in the separate standardisation of "JavaScript" (now called "ECMAScript"), currently being undertaken by ECMA in an effort driven by Sun, Microsoft and others.
JSG will definitely meet in London at the end of June. The meeting will be hosted by the BSI. The UK Java panel (IST/5/-/53) will meet a couple of times before then. The panel conve-nor is Derek Jones of Knowledge Software <derek@knosof.co.uk> - contact him for more details if you wish to be involved.
