On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 18:11:45 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
Through the Java Community Process (http://jcp.org). Basically,
it's where the proposals for APIs are reviewed. It started
after many people found that the Sun APIs sucked (basically,
Sun didn't have the manpower to follow all the requests of
their users) and founded the Apache and Spring projects to
compensate for some missing parts (the logging API for
instance).
Afterwards, key developers of those open source projects became
active part of the JCP, and companies followed.
Rereading this paragraph, I find this is somewhat inaccurate. Sun
AFAIK has nothing to do with Apache and Spring, and the JCP
started before these open source projects. What I wanted to
stress though, was that many important and successful APIs have
been developed after open source developments, and were designed
by members of these communities (several of which were employed
by big companies afterwards). An example being the "Enterprise
JavaBeans", which were enterprise crap when designed by Sun (EJB1
and EJB2), and they finally got it right after the lead developer
of the Hibernate project came onboard.
