In the movie 2010, Dave Bowman (astronaut, sometime giant baby floating in space and Hal nemesis) tells us that very soon "something wonderful" will happen. Well it happened earlier this week when the final votes for EE6 and all of its constituent component specifications, such as JSR 299 and 303, were counted. As you can see, with the exception of one negative vote, Web Beans, lead by our very own Gavin King, passed with flying colours! Emmanuel Bernard, leading Bean Validation for us, had similar success. Congratulations to them both!
But of course it's EE6 that rolls them all up and it has taken some time for us to get to this stage. It passed with a vast majority of positive votes. There are still some concerns around licensing, which lead to the negative and abstaining votes. But overall this is a major contribution to the whole JEE landscape. We know from the success of Seam and other open source projects we're leading that the community has been shouting for this for a long time. There was a call to allow slimming of deployments to target applications that didn't need the whole EE stack. Yes you could do this for a long time in a non-standard way, but EE6 now standardizes this, which is a far more difficult and yet far more important step. In many ways this is at the heart of our Open Choice effort that we announced earlier this year.
If you look at EE6 compared to EE5 you'll see a fundamental change: the addition of JSR 299. I've mentioned before how this is important to everything we're doing in JBoss in the future, but I recommend you read what Gavin has to say on the subject, since this has been close to his heart for many years! Expect to see a lot more from us on this subject over the coming months and years. This really is a paradigm shift for EE6.
One final word: it's interesting to notice that SpringSource did not cast any votes on EE6 or related specifications. Is it because they didn't believe the work was good enough (you can abstain and leave a comment to that effect if you want), or maybe they realise that with EE6 we've now got an open standard for simplifying the Java Platform? Of course it could be for some other completely unrelated reason(s). Maybe time will tell.