News

Oracle Transfers Ownership of MVC to the Community

• By John K. Waters
• February 8, 2017

Oracle Corp. is transferring full ownership of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) specification to the Java community, the company announced. Once the transfer is completed, long-time contributor Ivar Grimstad will serve as a purely community spec lead for JSR 371, the MVC 1.0 standard.

The previous MVC spec leads, Oracle's Santiago Pericasgeertsen, and Manfred Riem, announced the initiation of a Transfer Ballot to the Expert Group of the Java Community Process (JCP) on Jan. 17. That ballot closed on January 31st, and the Executive Committee of the JCP approved the transfer. The community will now be responsible for moving the MVC 1.0 spec forward on its own.

The MVC is a common pattern in Web frameworks, where it is used primarily in HTML-based applications. As defined by the JCP, the "Model" is the application data, the "View" is the app's data presentation, and the "Controller" is the part of the system responsible for managing input and producing representations.

In November, Oracle revealed it would be investigating a possible transfer of JSR 371 to another community member or organization to be completed as a stand-alone component. At that time, the company also notified the Java community officially of its intention to withdraw the JSRs for the Java EE Management API 2.0 (JSR 373) and JMS 2.1 (JSR 368).

Oracle took those steps, the company said, in response to a survey of the Java community it conducted in September-October 2016, in which community members were asked to prioritize the most frequently requested features of the enterprise Java platform. Management, JMS and MVC were ranked at or near the bottom of all technologies surveyed, Java EE Evangelist David Delabassee wrote in a blog post on The Aquarium Web site. The results of that survey were released in December.

Grimstad is principal consultant at Swedish IT consulting company Cybercom, a Java Champion, JUG leader, EC member and NetBeans Dream Team member. He addressed the question of why he would want to take over as spec lead of a JSR ranked so low in that survey in a blog post. Among other reasons, he pointed to widespread support for the MVC spec among Java User Groups, and he expressed some skepticism about the survey's questionnaire. He cited the results of a survey conducted by the Java EE Guardians, in which more than 30 percent of the respondents answered "Very Important" to the question "How important is it to add a new action-oriented MVC framework to Java EE?"

Reza Rahman, a long-time enterprise Java evangelist and founding member of the Java EE Guardians, was delighted by the "awesome news" of the MVC spec transfer, and he encouraged his fellow Guardians in a recent Google Groups message to support the spec. "I would sincerely urge you to contribute to the MVC specification now more than ever," he wrote. "It is very important that together we demonstrate that the community alone can make Java EE ecosystem JSRs successful even without Oracle or any other major vendor."