>For all you Java savvy folks out there, how about "standards" like
>J2EE that make it easy to move an application from one vendors app.
>server to another.  Works for the simplest of applications, but all
>vendors have their own specific custom deployment descriptors too.

One thing I really like about Java "standards" is the notion of a
"reference implementation". The idea of actually having to build something
to prove that the spec can be supported seems both obvious and audacious
at the same time. I think there's a lot that could learned from the Java
BluePrints process (wikipedia has a nice short blurb on this -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_BluePrints). If the "Pet Store"
blueprint, for example, was the "circ desk" blueprint, or something
similar, it would be an interesting way for comparing solutions using
different toolkits, in the same way that the Pet Store has been
implemented in practically every development environment on the planet. I
used to think that this would be a great section on the code4lib site,
sort of a "this month's solution to the Circ Desk blueprint", but that was
back when we were talking about a journal and I think somewhere along the
way that our day jobs started to overwhelm the possibilities.

art