RE: JSR-000093: JAXR - your opinions?

[Bob Sutor <rss@sutor.com>]

The reason why I asked these questions is that since last summer I have been
talking about various aspects of standards creation. For example, we have

1) the creation of the spec
2) the creation of an API that is not language-specific
3) language-specific bindings
4) conformance tests
5) certification

A natural question is how much of 2) - 5) should the creators in 1) produce.
Many people believe that conformance tests should not be done by the people
who did the spec because a neutral party might do a better job, although
possibly with less inside knowledge of ambiguity resolution that is in the
heads of the implementors. The W3C and OASIS have different opinions here,
for example. ebXML will have to deal with 4) and 5) eventually.

In the same way, language-specific bindings can be done by the spec
implementors or by another organization. Perhaps the spec implementors can
do a better job at the bindings, if they have the resources available. This
also makes the general standards/binding development process more scalable
than always doing in one organization associated with the language.

Bob Sutor, IBM
ebXML Vice-Chair