On June 25, 2003, Oracle submitted JSR 227 to the JCP. JSR 227 is aimed at establishing an API and associated metadata format for declaratively binding and accessing data in J2EE applications.

1.  What is the new JSR 227 submitted by Oracle about?
The new JSR 227 is aimed at establishing a common API and meta-data format that will offer a standard declarative way to bind data from a business service, such as Web services, EJB, Java, JCA, JDBC, to other entities such as UI components for example Swing component or JSP/JSF Web component.

2.  Why is JSR 227 so important for the Java Community as a whole?
Today there is no standard way to bind data from different sources into Java UIs. Developers have gone and written this layer themselves by hand, in all sorts of different ways. This situation makes the integration of new types of components both on the user interface side and the business services side difficult. The new JSR completely decouples the user interface from the data portions of the application. This will allow a plug-and-play approach to binding any user interfaces to any type of business service as long as they both implement the proposed API. Oracle realized that having an easy declarative way to bind business services to UI components is critical in order to simplify the development of J2EE applications that can be accessed from a variety of different interfaces.

3.  Which vendors supported Oracle's JSR submission?
Oracle's was the primary submitter of JSR 227 with the support of Sun.
The following companies voted in favor of the JSR advancing:
Apache, Apple, Borland, Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, Iona, Macromedia, Nokia, SAP, and Sun.

4.  Why is this JSR important to Oracle?
Oracle realized there was no standard that defines the interaction between business services and user interfaces components. Oracle believes defining this interaction is an important part of almost every application and is a key component of productive J2EE development. While developing the new Oracle JDeveloper and the Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle created an innovative implementation of this functionality. Oracle decided to contribute its knowledge and experience in this area to lead the establishment of a new standard. In the past, since no such standard existed, productivity frameworks each offered its own custom solution for handling the data binding "plumbing" between user interfaces and business services. JSR 227 opens up this tight coupling by defining a standard that will allow any business servic,regardless of its implementation, to seamlessly interact with any user interface technology.

5. How does Oracle JDeveloper relate to JSR 227?
Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), which is shipping as part of the upcoming Oracle JDeveloper release, contains an implementation of the data binding technology that is at the origin of JSR 227. This implementation will be the starting point for JSR 227. As JSR 227 evolves, the Oracle implementation will evolve to stay aligned with the JSR 227 specification.

6. Where can I find more information about JSR 227?