JSR-314 Disbanded With a Gap in Succession

Jay Balunas, a core JBoss developer and project lead for RichFaces blogged today about Red Hat's concern over the disbanding of the JSF expert group, under the JCP specification JSR-314, by Oracle.  Balunas said on the JBoss developer blog that, "Oracle/Sun's decision to disband the JSF expert group (JSR-314) with no successor JSR filed under which to develop future revisions of JSF is disappointing."

According to Balunas, the expert group was still very active in their communication and development, and he doesn't believe that dissolution of the group was necessary.  He says that it will now be "very difficult" to continue supporting the Java Server Faces specification without an official JSF and EG in the JCP, mainly because there are no longer intellectual property and governance guarantees involved in JSF development if there is no current or successor JSR for JSF.

While JBoss develops component libraries for the JSF 2.0 specification, they are finding areas that need to be changed in the specification, but now that there is no JSR, those changes have to be pushed to a future specification in order to be standardized.  Balunas said, "Take for example #658 which deals with a problem with the PartialViewContext and how component libraries can extend it without breaking other component libraries. The RichFaces team has provided a draft patch to resolve this (thanks Nick) , however due to timing this will not be included in JSF 2.1."

In August, JBoss developers Dan Allen, Lincoln Baxter, III and Pete Muir talked about the need for a JSF 2.1 JSR or some other successor to JSF 2.0:

Our participation in the development of JSF 2.1 is contingent upon the submission of a new JSR and approval of our request to become an EG member of that specification, for which we now call. If we're going to improve JSF, it needs to be a sincere commitment to do what needs to be done within an open JCP process.

Because there's no timeframe on when a JSR will form for JSF 2.2+, the Seam and RichFaces developers will keep making features that users need, but now some of those features may end up drifting outside of the JSF specification.  View Actions, for example, will be implemented in Seam Faces instead of the specification.  RichFaces developers will continue their ongoing discussions with other JSF libraries (IceFaces, PrimeFaces, etc.) about how to deal with the issues caused by JSR-314's dissolution.  

You can read Jay Balunas's blog here.  You can also read Dan Allen's letter to the JSR-314 mailing list.