>The way you connect the RAR to the MDB is undefined because "expert group" can't be bothered.

And which expert group might that be? Java EE, JCA, JMS, EJB? There's no JCA EG at the moment, just a (former) spec lead who's available for maintenance. There's also no EJB EG at the moment.

As with any open source project, it's a matter of pushing if you really want to get some train getting forward. Linux is no different. Try persuading those guys to accept your patch. No easy feat.

Some things are just controversial in any project. I remember the endless debates in the Pidgin project about the stupid size of the text input.

In Java EE there are debates about having resources inside the war. Many are against, I argued for a long time that they should also be inside, and maybe my emails and posts helped since in Java EE 7 almost every resource can be defined in the war.

But if you first asked it, and asked the wrong person (e.g. this Jesper guy from JBoss) you'll get a NO, GO AWAY! If you are immediately turned down by that, nothing ever changes.

There's this other guy in Java EE who keeps bringing up the topic of standardizing logging, who doesn't seem to get very far. Some things are just not accepted, other things are a matter of talking to the right people, finding like minded souls and keep pushing. Again, no different from any other (big) open source project.

In this case, I'm simply not an expert on JCA, so I can't say if you're right or wrong. You did also say that JMS was not even at Java 1.4, which was clearly wrong, so I do take what you say with a grain of salt if you don't mind (no offense, really).

If this is indeed as badly defined as you claim, please, make your voice heard. Create a JIRA issue, tweet about it (cc @Java_ee or @dblevins). I know David has been fighting to improve JCA and make it simpler.

No product is perfect. If Java EE was utterly perfect than we would not have needed Java EE 8. But guess what, Spring is far from perfect either and by the same token if it was there would not have been a need for Spring 4 last year and there would not have been a need for the next version.

>A very good explanation of what's wrong with JMS.

The article is about JCA and EJB, I don't see JMS itself there.

>I personally spoke to the spec lead at JavaOne and he couldn't be bothered.

Which spec lead are you talking about? Nigel from JMS, or someone else?

>Did you or did you not personally file a single issue?

I love it how you conveniently evade the "prove" I provided that clearly shows that many features that ended up in Java EE originated from community proposed issues. Likewise, if you switch over to the implementation trackers you'll find that patches originate from the community. Be it for Mojarra (JSF), Hibernate (JPA), or whatever.

Whether I personally filed issues is almost irrelevant in the face of the examples I provided to you. But if you really want to know; yes, I filed a ton of issues. In fact, I filed a bunch from the very nick (henk53) I'm using here, as well as many in name of the customers I've been working for.

Quite a lot were resolved. Some in a short time, others took ridiculously long, but were eventually resolved. And some were never resolved. Geronimo is the one and only where I just could not get through to. Funny thing is that in theory they are the most open of all parties.