IndicThreads >> The Jakarta project has been the birth place of many popular Java applications. Which projects do you think can be useful to most developers?

Henri Yandell >> I really liked using Velocity on a web-agnostic report tool recently, but I'm not involved with it community-wise (apart from vague worries). It embedded nicely into the engine and was very easy for the developers to use to customize the report output.

My next suggestion is going to show my bias as I've been very involved with it for the last few years. Jakarta Commons is a very useful assortment of (usually) simple libraries. It's often extremely easy to dig into the source if you have a problem, as the source is often a shallow method and not a large framework of classes. The Commons mailing list can be quite a hurdle to overcome. As well as being a reusable collation of libraries, Commons is also a social experiment in having a highly overlapping set of sub-communities within a larger community. The various sub-communities of Jakarta operate pretty independently on day to day issues, but the tiny Commons sub-communities interact and feed off each other constantly.

"Commons and Velocity should be of most use to most people..."

I pick Commons and Velocity because they're very independent of the web-layer, and should be of most use to most people.

If you've not noticed it yet, I say community a lot. Community is very much a watch-word at Apache, and it's something I'm a strong believer in. I'd much rather we were talking about open-community projects than open-source projects, what would be the point of an open-source project with a closed mailing list, no bug tracker and no CVS access?

"Community is very much a watch-word at Apache,
and it's something I'm a strong believer in..."

IndicThreads >> And which projects are still in the nascent stages but you think hold a lot of promise for the future?

Henri Yandell >> Hivemind and Agila. I'd like to learn more about both and how I can use them in my day to day job. Hivemind looks like it will be like Velocity and Commons, a completely web-agnostic reusable tool, and I've heard interesting things about its configuration format.

"Hivemind and Agila hold a lot of promise for the future..."

Agila (currently in the Apache Incubator) is a business rules engine and that's something I've never played with before. I used Jess a long time ago and am interested in whether I'm even on the right track on using them in the same paragraph.

IndicThreads >> Object relational persistence tools like Hibernate and frameworks like Spring have become quite popular. Do you think Java development over the next few years will be driven by such tools?

Henri Yandell >> Struts can answer that I think. Hibernate and Spring will probably follow the same adoption model that Struts had, in fact if you could figure out the correct events to model, I'd bet that the lifespans of Hibernate and Struts look very similar while Spring is probably still on the way up the ladder.

"Hibernate and Spring will probably
follow the same adoption model that Struts had..."

If we look at it like that, Java development for the last few years has been driven by these sorts of tools. The really interesting part is that the de facto success of Struts has pretty much driven the de jure specification of Java Server Faces. Equally, I'm constantly reading website reports about Hibernate's influence on EJB-3 and the wonderful JCP politics between EJB and JDO, so this seems like it will be another case of today's de facto open-source project becoming tomorrow's de jure JSR.

"This seems like it will be another case
of today's de facto open-source project
becoming tomorrow's de jure JSR..."

In addition to Struts, you pretty much have to add Ant, JUnit and Log4J as major de facto open-source projects. The existence of Log4j had a lot of influence on java.util.logging's second specification, and JUnit has if nothing else got many Java developers used to the assert concept that was introduced later as a Java keyword.

Throw in Doug Lea's concurrency library, and the influence of the Java community on Java today is etched very deeply. Probably only the release of C# has affected it more :)

"What effect will Spring be having on the JSRs in 2006?"

Which begs the question of what effect Spring will be having on the JSRs in 2006.