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[jakarta.ee-spec.committee] Sample Specification Scope Statements

Greetings Jakarta EE Specification Committee.

This is not a request for a formal vote.

We have made some progress on gathering scope statements for our specifications. It's time for us to make another push to get the project teams involved. Before we do that, however, I'd like to have some confidence that we're on the right track to mitigate the risk that we'll have to loop back with the project teams.

My opinions regarding what constitutes a good specification scope statement are captured in my blog post on the topic. The short version is that I recommend a concise "elevator pitch" style statement:

The scope statement must answer the question: what does an implementation of this specification do? The scope statement must be aspirational rather than attempt to capture any particular state at any particular point-in-time. A scope statement must not focus on the work planned for any particular version of the specification, but rather, define the problem space that the specification is intended to address.

I'm posting three statements below. I would like to know whether or not you, as a member of the specification committee, believe that these specification scope statements serve as adequate examples that we can take forward as inspiration for others.

More generally... at some point in the future, I will be asking you to vote in a ballot to approve the conversion/creation of specification projects that will include scope statements similar in nature to what is proposed below. In the absence of other considerations, would you be inclined to vote in the affirmative for the creation of specification projects that represent specifications with scope statements such as these?

Jakarta Activation lets you take advantage of standard services to: determine the MIME type of an arbitrary piece of data; encapsulate access to it; discover the operations available on it; and instantiate the appropriate bean to perform the operation(s).

https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/javamail/issues/376
Jakarta Mail provides a platform-independent and protocol-independent framework to build mail and messaging applications. 

https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/jpa-api/issues/211
Jakarta Persistence defines a standard for management of persistence and object/relational mapping in Java(TM) environments.

For this specific request, I'd prefer it if you could let the group know if you believe that we're on the right track. If you think that only some subset are the right track, it would be great if you could highlight that subset. 

If you have specific issues with one of the statements, it's best that you engage on the cited GitHub issue to address it directly with the project team (and avoid splitting the discussion).

We'd really like to get this process moving along; I apologise for the short notice, but I'd really like to have your answer in time for our Wednesday meeting.

Thanks,

Wayne
--

Wayne Beaton

Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation, Inc.


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