Surprise, surprise! Our JSR-331 actually won the JCP Award for The Most Innovative JSR of 2010. It was announced at Java One on September 22 in San Francisco. It is certainly nice, and what the JCP notification page says about JSR-331 is flattering: “JSR 331, Constraint Programming. This JSR represents the real innovation in SE/EE since the 300 number of JSRs started; where almost every other JSR especially in SE/EE is just an upgrade to existing technologies.”
However, from a pure Java perspective I think there were more deserving nominees, see for example JSR-299, Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform. Here what JCP says about it: “Critics have foreshadowed the death of the Java language, claiming that there is little more than can be done to evolve it and therefore needs to be replaced. JSR 299 silenced these viewpoints.”
It is interesting that we did nothing to nominate or somehow promote our JSR – I simply had no idea about this competition. Of course, I understand this award is more related to the recognition of the CP technology itself. But it also shows that CP is still not within main stream of real-world application development where it certainly deserves to be. Hopefully this award and the standard API will make CP more visible and accessible to Java developers. So, now it becomes even more important to expedite creation of a JSR-331 User Manual and making initial implementations available for free downloads to all application developers.
Congratulations Jacob!
I am sure the award also reflects your good work, as well as the promises of CP.