On this topic, Danny Coward recently referred to a limited form of operator overloading specifically for BigDecimal. Good to know this is still in Sun's thinking.
I'm continuing to look for users and companies who are willing to back the requirement for decimal syntax in Java, regardless of whether this is via limited operator overloading or decimal-specific support, so if anyone is interested, I'm all ears.
Eric Newcomer says he's enjoyed working in the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. From my experience of the OSGi Core Platform Expert Group, which has a significant overlap with the EEG, I'd certainly agree.
The defining characteristic of the OSGi Alliance seems to be that the members are there with a fairly clear common purpose. Other standards groups I've been involved in - and I'm not just talking about the JCP - have tended to suffer from divergent objectives among the members.
Maybe the key is that OSGi provides a dynamic component model which is broadly applicable across small devices, PCs, and large servers and that it has strong conceptual integrity making it easy to learn and apply.
I also found Eric's recent InfoQ interview on OSGi futures interesting - take a look.
