Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 9:30, Bob Lee and I will talk about the work in progress on JSR-299. Over the last couple of months, we've been working with the rest of the Web Beans expert group to create a component model that combines the best of Seam, Juice, JSF and EJB 3.0. The end goal is the definitive programming model for business logic components in Java, combining Seam's state management with Guice's typesafety.

For those not at J1, we'll have more to say later :-)

The Web Beans JSR was approved unanimously by the JCP executive committee. You can read the proposal here:

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299

We've already received a bunch of expert nominations from companies and individuals, and so I'm sure we'll be able to form a very talented expert group over the next few weeks. If you're interested, the nomination form is here:

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/egnom?id=299

This is the first time JBoss (or even Red Hat) has led a JSR, so we are very excited about this opportunity to serve the Java EE community!

The recently finalized Java EE 5 platform dramatically simplifies development of Java applications.

For example, no other programming environment in existence makes it as easy to access transactional resources - particularly relational databases - as EJB 3.0. The combination of plain Java classes, annotations and deep integration of a full-fledged O/R mapping solution leapfrogs all other contenders in this space.

Even better, EE 5 is designed for extension, so we expect to see a flowering of new open source frameworks built to run on and integrate with this new platform. Seam is a perfect example of what is possible here. The deep integration of EJB, JSF and jBPM would simply not have been possible in J2EE 1.4.

Well, it turns out that Seam has been recieved with enthusiasm. The user community is buzzing, with hundreds of Seam projects in the works, and the first crop of Seam applications going into production over the next couple of months. Seam 1.0 will be released in the next few weeks. In light of this success, we've decided the time is ripe to bring some of the ideas in Seam back to the JCP.

So we've been working with Sun, Oracle, Borland, Google and Sybase to put together a JSR proposal for a new spec that will draw on ideas from Seam, Struts Shale and Oracle ADF and push forward with the next layer of simplification of enterprise Java. Today we submitted the Web Beans JSR, which will address the problem of deeply integrating EJB 3.0 with the web tier, including, to quote from the proposal:

* Definition of additional capabilities to be used with the EJB component model, 
  allowing EJB beans to act as JSF managed beans in a JavaServer Faces application.

* Definition of a unified annotation-based facility for manipulating contextual 
  variables in a stateful, contextual, component-base architecture.

* Definition of an enhanced context model including conversational and business 
  process contexts.

* Definition of an extension point allowing integration of business process 
  management engines with the contextual component model.

* Integration of Java Persistence API extended persistence contexts with the 
  enhanced context model.

* Collaboration with the JSF and Common Annotations for the Java Platform expert 
  groups on the definition of Java annotation based metadata for JSF.

We're all looking forward to serving the Java community with this new work!

Read the press release here:

http://jboss.com/pdf/press/webbeans.pdf