Business-driven APIs
A new kind of APIs is emerging: the APIs written by businesses rather than by IT corporations. Some examples would be Operations Support Systems for Java and Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards. Various corporations are collaborating and setting up standards regarding the processes that they have to manage, and I think this is the right way to go about it, after all they know what they are talking about, they have decades of experience in their business, they have some ideas about where it is going. They know what interactions are performed between different IT systems in their organization. They are the ones in the best position to determine how their processes should be abstracted.
Sun, IBM, BEA, Oracle, etc… should concern themselves with the plumbing of the IT infrastructure rather than with defining how a business process should occur and interact with other processes. They should avoid business-oriented APIs and delegate this to the businesses that have been running this process. As far as JCP is involved they should be inviting parties outside the IT landscape for supervising business-oriented JSRs and defining the main business rules. JSR 144 is a fine example of this approach: take a look at its expert group and count the organizations which are not involved in IT.
As far as the developer is concerned: today your average developer is expected to know a few infrastructure APIs: the Servlet spec, Struts, Spring, maybe EJBs… I wouldn’t wonder if in the future a developer working for a telco would be required to know telco-specific, business-driven APIs in order for it to be more productive. In other words the developer would be expected to know the business rules which this API is formalizing. Another step in bridging the gap between a business analyst and a developer.
P.S. The involvement of businesses in the creation and management of business-oriented JSRs benefits the IT corporations backing JEE a lot. The effort made by a business thru-out this process will translate in some form of a commitment to the JEE platform which would benefit the IT corporations involved and ultimately JEE. The JCP process could (and should) act as a communication channel between big-business and JEE.
