This fact has somehow slipped by me unnoticed so far: As the JSR-341 websites claim, Java is going to add full .NET-Style LINQ support to its expression language 3.0!
While the JSR-341 website doesn’t explicitly mention these feature additions to the expression language, a lot of details can be seen here:
http://java.net/projects/el-spec/pages/CollectionOperations
This is very interesting, and raises a lot of questions:
- Is Microsoft on board – i.e. are they part of the expert group?
- Will Microsoft surrender / sell their LINQ-related patents to Oracle?
- … or will Oracle challenge those patents?
- Why would LINQ be added to the EL before it is added to the platform?
Anyway, the mailing lists don’t seem very active and the draft specs is still in a rather early stage. We’ll see where this goes, but this is clearly an addition that I will follow closely in the future!
See also my previous blog post on the subject