15th Anniversary of JSR 275
After we just celebrated the 25th birthday of Java a few weeks ago, today marks the 15th anniversary of the JSR 275 creation review ballot.
2005 was also the "World Year of Physics" or "Einstein Year", celebrating Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers being published 100 years earlier, the first on the 9th of June, 1905.
The JSR was rejected by the JCP EC about 5 years later, largely because the Internet of Things or connected devices did not exist then and several members that later joined the IoT bandwagon felt, there was not enough momentum. Nevertheless that JSR introduced some key aspects also used in later successors like type-safe Generics or the "javax.measure" namespace. While the JCP and its EC felt it was too early, JSR 275 and JScience 4 were all but abandoned by the community and used by many projects or commercial products despite its non-final verdict.
Since its creation, the JSR 275 API was downloaded nearly 855,000 times from Maven type repositories. In the last 12 months, the "javax.measure" APIs were downloaded more than a Million times, with Unit-API (JSR 363/385) now getting more downloads per year than 275 did in its entire lifetime, but it also still is downloaded around 250k times, a number not many Open Source projects hold, especially after 15 years.
