Alibaba misses Java seat as MicroProfile champ lands a first

Web commerce giant Alibaba has failed in its bid to steward Java in an election that largely returned a familiar blend of members.

Jack Ma's firm failed to win enough votes to secure a place on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), receiving just 5 per cent of the 983 votes cast.

The firm's JVM team lead Haiping Zhao was standing for one of six elected EC seats, having only joined the JCP in August.

Alibaba claims to have "tens of thousands of machines running Java every second" and wanted to rework Java's realtime performance – garbage collection, deployment plus just-in-time compilation – for super-web scale.

With just three months under its belt as a JCP member, it's likely Alibaba was unable to build an electoral base or large enough profile in time for the election.

Overall, 12 of the available 15 seats open went to incumbents – ratified, elected and brand-new associate seats.

Tomitribe was one newcomer who did get enough votes to claim an EC seat. The company is a supporter of MicroProfile, the project for a lightweight and modular Java currently making its way to the Eclipse Foundation. MicroProfile sprung to life following Oracle's foot-dragging on delivering Java EE 8 as its engineers were reassigned to built Oracle's cloud.

David Blevins, Tomitribe chief executive and founder, was elected to one of six vacant elected seats with 9 per cent of votes. He will serve a one-year term on the EC.

Also joining him on the associate seats will be independent newbies Ivar Grimstad, serving for two years, and Werner Keil, with a one-year term.

The election's big winner overall was the Eclipse Foundation, which – once again – secured more votes than anybody else, 26 per cent or 141 in total, reaffirming its position on the EC. ®