Choice and Innovation in J2EE

Congratulations to the JBoss guys for the J2EE certification. That's a Very Good Thing to see that Open Source projects get certified. with JOnAS and Geronimo certifications coming soon, the J2EE market could be shaken up.

That's great because it'll bring innovation (EJB3) from both the Open Source and the proprietary stack (BEA, IBM, Oracle) under the stewardship of the JCP. It'll also increase choice which is also a Very Very Good Thing.

When I see people on TheServerSide complaining that there is too much choice in Java (Hibernate or JDO, Ant or Maven, JBoss or Weblogic, ...), it reminds me of my use of Emacs and Vi. I'm very happy to be able to use one tool or the other for a given task and not to be bound to an inadequate tool.