I am less than impressed with this article.

The author is arguing that proprietary extensions threaten the promise of standards based application portability—that Java’s promise of “write once, run anywhere” is dead, and was never a reality anyway. This demonstrates to me a tremendous lack of vision.

The J2EE platform is growing as a language. This means starting small and collecting the best contributions over time into a larger, more capable language. The language evolves with the community that uses it. A standards based approach to application development suggests that if you constrain yourself to using only the standard features and interfaces, then you should be portable to any implementation. Generally, that is true of J2EE; standards based portability is certainly more a reality with J2EE than on any other equivalent platform (e.g., Microsoft .NET).

Proprietary extensions by application server vendors are expected. Applications written to the standard will still be portable, because they do not depend on proprietary extensions. In time, the scope of standards will expand, as technologies mature and become commonplace. The industry’s best practices become encoded into standards, because the market demands it for portability (reducing costs). Innovation (proprietary extensions) will happen further out into the leading edge, where technologies are unproven. Vendors can differentiate their product based on quality of implemention and value added features. The latter requires extending beyond the standard features.

The article paints a picture of a static standard, which is being eroded. In reality the J2EE standard is constantly evolving to expand its capabilities. Application server vendors are moving in lock step to embrace the newest standard; often, their products have already implemented the standard by the time it is officially published. In reality, J2EE application portability is continually improving rather than being threatened due to this natural evolution.