In the elections for the ME EC two current members were re-elected: Intel and Orange France.

Intel has been a member of the Java ME EC for the past four years. The company has created optimized implementations of the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and Connected Device Configuration (CDC) specifications, and is a strong proponent of open standards. Their representative on the ME EC is Eric Dittert, a senior staff software engineer in the Software and Solutions Group. Eric has led or contributed to a number of advanced software research and development projects, including optimizing Java Virtual Machines for Intel platforms. Eric believes that now the JCP has established its ability to produce quality specifications the organization should embrace the challenge of lowering barriers to implementation and adoption. "Open, uniform licensing practices would help adoption a lot," he says. "And if the community could develop TCKs more efficiently that would lessen the burden on Spec Leads and decrease the licensing costs for independent implementers."

Orange, a France Telecom division, is a major player in the European cellphone market. Since they joined the JCP in 2003 Orange has contributed to almost 20 JSRs. The company is concerned about fragmentation in the Java mobile space, and is committed to improving the situation. Orange is represented on the ME EC by Philippe Lucas, director of standardization. Phillipe is also on the Board of Directors of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). Security and certification are the most compelling aspects to be addressed in the JCP program Philippe says, and he also expects the JCP program to encourage the development of specifications related to IP-based Multimedia Services (IMS).

On the SE/EE EC one current member (Google) was re-elected; the other winner (the Eclipse Foundation) is new to the EC and relatively new to the JCP.

Google makes extensive use of Java in its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Since joining the JCP and winning a seat on the SE/EE EC in 2004 Google has participated in 23 Expert Groups. Google is represented on the EC by Josh Bloch - their Chief Java Architect. Josh is author of "Effective Java" (Addison-Wesley, 2001) and coauthor of "Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases" (Addison-Wesley, 2005). Before joining Google he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he led the design and implementation of several Java platform features, including JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the Java Collections Framework.

The Eclipse Foundation is an open source community focused on defining an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software. Eclipse's representative on the SE/EE EC will be their Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich. Mike has more than 20 years' experience in the software industry. Most recently he was a vice president in Oracle's Development Group and before that he held positions at WebGain, The Object People, Object Technology International, and IBM - where he was responsible for worldwide product marketing of a major IBM software product line and for defining the technical strategy for the VisualAge for Java tools product.

I'd like to congratulate all of this year's winners - and also to thank the runners-up for their participation. In each EC election the third-place candidates were individuals who put up a strong showing: Rod Johnson from Interface21 (www.springsource.com/web/guest/home) for the SE/EE EC and Sean Sheedy (http://seansheedy.com/ec/) for the ME EC. The other runners-up were Ericsson AB, CodeGear, Klaus Meffert, and Pierre-Henry Perret for the SE/EE EC, and Luiz Carlos Bentes dos Anjos and Marlon Faria da Luz for the ME EC.

For more information about all of the candidates in this year's election visit www.jcpelection2007.org/.

The newly elected and re-elected members took office on November 27 and met for their first Executive Committees Meeting on December 4.

Latest JSR Picks
Two new JSRs were approved by the Executive Committees recently. (New JSR proposals must be approved by ballot before they can proceed.)

JSR 319: Availability Management for Java (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=319) is led by Ericsson. This is their first JSR targeting the Java SE/EE platforms, although they have been very active in Java ME. This JSR will define APIs for managing availability management frameworks (AMFs) in Java EE and Java SE. An AMF manages redundant resources within a cluster in order to deliver a system with no single point of failure. The JSR will not specify what framework should be used, but will use a service-provider mechanism to allow multiple frameworks to be supported. However, implementations must make it possible to support the AMF defined by the Service Availabily Forum (http://www.saforum.org/home) consortium, making this yet another example of a JSR that builds on a standard that was defined outside the JCP. This JSR also indicates the growing maturity of the Java platform. High Availability is an operating-system level concept, and it's interesting to see it applied to Java.

The second new JSR - JSR 320: Services Framework (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=320) - targets the other end of the platform spectrum. This JSR, which is led by Cingular Wireless, will define high level, lightweight services and management framework API's that will enable Java ME CLDC- and CDC-based devices to manage long running applications and services. Once again this JSR is building on other standards, including JSR 279: Service Connection API for Java™ ME (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=279), and work done by the Device Management Working Group (www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/wg_committees/dm.html) of the Open Mobile Alliance.

Two other JSRs - both targeted at Java EE - entered the Early Draft Review process recently. (During this process JCP members and the public get their first chance to review and comment on the specification.).

JSR 299: Web Beans (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299) is led by Red Hat Middleware, and will enable Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) 3.0 components to be used as JavaServer Faces (JSF) managed beans, thereby unifying the two component models and considerably simplifying the programming model for Java web-based applications. Specifically, JSR 299 plans to define a programming model that will enable the rapid development of simple data-driven applications (a domain in which Java EE has been criticized as overly complex) without sacrificing the full power of the Java EE 5 platform.

JSR 311 - JAX-RS: The Java™ API for RESTful Web Services (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=311), led by Sun Microsystems, will provide a high level easy-to-use API for developers to write RESTful web services independent of the underlying technology, and will allow these services to run on top of the Java EE or the Java SE platforms. (The expert group will also explore the possibility of defining a subset of the API that can be used with Java ME.) Currently, building RESTful Web services using the Java platform is significantly more complex than building SOAP-based services and requires using low-level APIs.

Several other JSRs also moved through the process since my last column. As always, you can find full details about active JSRs in the Focus on JSRs section of the JCP home page (http://jcp.org/en/home/index).