My years toiling away on web services seem to be paying off: I’ve been invited to be a member of the JCP Expert Group for JSR-261 (Web Services Addressing).

A primer:

• JCP is the Java Community Process: it’s the mechanism for developing standard technical specifications for Java technology. Basically, whatever is decided upon in a JSR goes into the next version of Java.
• JSR is a Java Specification Request: the formal documents that describe proposed specifications and technologies for adding to the Java platform.
• Expert Group: the members of a specific JSR that figure out the proposed spec.
• JAX-WSA: is the Java API for XML Web Services Addressing (JAX-WSA). It defines (or will define) APIs and a framework for supporting transport-neutral addressing of web services. You can read more about WS-Addressing here.

This should be an interesting experience: I’m one of four individual contributors in the expert group, the rest of the members are representatives of their firms (Sun, Oracle, IBM, etc.). I’m informed that the expert groups can be a bit tetchy at times, we shall see how it pans out.