JavaOne 2011 Round-Up

JavaOne 2011 was very busy this year for me but also very fruitful. Although this year I did not get a chance to attend a single session other than my own (I spoke seven times in four days so it was very hard), I think the conference overall went well. It is still unfortunate that Oracle continues to ignore the obvious fact that JavaOne needs a much bigger venue and it needs to take place on a time separate from OracleWorld...

On Monday, I started with the panel on the JCP titled "JCP and the Developer Community". Considering that this was pretty much a non-technical topic, it was good to see that the attendance/participation was decent, although I had expected the discussion to be a bit more lively. Regardless, it seems that Oracle is taking JCP reforms very seriously and giving real funds to the JCP organization (which Sun did not or could not). In the afternoon, I attended the technical session that Marina Vatkina of Oracle was giving on the progress of EJB 3.2. Not surprisingly, it looked to be a very short talk because of the worrisome lack of progress in the EJB 3.2 EG. Somewhat disappointingly, the audience participation was not that good -- it seemed most of the attendees either did not have an opinion or did not voice them. I and JMS 2 spec lead Nigel Deakin of Oracle tried to liven things up a little but trying to directly engage the audience, with some success. That evening, we repeated some of the same discussions in the BOF titled "Meet the Experts: EJB 3.2 Expert Group". Given the lackluster technical talk, it was not entirely surprising that the BOF attendance was sparse. After the BOF I had a long conversation with David Blevins of Apache and Andrew Rubinger of JBoss/Red Hat about my concerns around EJB 3.2.

Tuesday morning I and Ryan worked together to put the finishing touches/rehearse our CDI talk. The speaker resources were paltry so we wound up going to the lounge of a nearby hotel to work. In the afternoon, Nigel, I and Clebert did the JMS 2 BOF titled "JSR 343: What's Coming in Java Message Service 2.0". Although this was technically a BOF, it was really more like a full conference session and we actually had a slide deck. They gave us a very big room and it was almost a full house. We didn't have much time left for Q & A, but we had a number of interesting follow-up discussions with attendees in the hallway after the talk. Tuesday evening I went to the JBoss party to talk about CDI 1.1, EJB 3.2 and Java EE 7 with Pete Muir, Dan Allen, Andrew Rubinger, et al. The discussion went well and it seems we are all on the same page.

Wednesday morning Nigel, Pete and I brainstormed about the dependency injection based changes in JMS 2. I did not expect to have all the outstanding issues resolved but I think we made good progress. At noon, I did the panel on Java EE 7 titled "The Road to Java EE 7: Is It All About the Cloud?". The panel was very well attended and the discussion was very good. I briefly chatted with Linda DeMicheal and Mike Keith of Oracle about Java EE 7 afterwards. In the afternoon, Ryan and I did the CDI talk titled "Patterns and Best Practices for CDI". Considering the fact that Ryan and I have never co-presented together before, the talk went very well. We had a full house and had a very good Q & A session. In the evening, Rohit Kelapure of IBM and I worked on our Spring/Java EE comparison talk. Since this talk was so last minute, we had to scramble to get the slide deck ready and wound up pulling an all-nighter. Rohit and I briefly showed up at the JCP hosted party (always rightfully rumored to be the "most lavish party at JavaOne").

On Thursday noon, I barely made it to the CDI panel titled "CDI Today and Tomorrow". The panel was very well attended and the discussion was very good. In the afternoon, Rohit and I had our talk titled "Java EE and Spring/MVC Shoot-out" (it was the last session of the conference). Despite the ordeal, doing the talk wound up being well worth it. It was an enthusiastic, overflow crowd. JMS 2 spec lead Ed Burns showed up as an attendee. The Q & A was great and a lot of people seemed to really appreciate the talk. It felt like one of the best talks I've done at JavaOne to date and a solid finish to an eventful week at JavaOne 2011.

A number of folks asked for the slides for the two tech talks, so the materials for the talks is posted here.

Speaking at JavaOne 2011!

It's always exciting to get JavaOne notifications - after all it is still the premier global Java conference! I have five talks this year.

One is a technical session titled "Patterns and Best Practices for CDI" that I'm co-presenting with Ryan Cuprak. It's a brand new talk so I am very excited that it got accepted. Another is a panel I co-submitted with Arun Gupta titled "CDI Today and Tomorrow". Arun will be moderating the panel. I, Pete Muir, David Blevins and Sivakumar Thyagarajan will be panelists. I'll be doing a JMS 2 BOF with spec lead Nigel Deakin and fellow EG member Clebert Suconic. I am a panelist on a talk on the JCP titled "JCP and the Developer Community". The other folks on the panel are Martijn Verburg from the London Java Community and Heather VanCura from the JCP program. I'll also be part of a larger panel titled "Java EE 7 - is it all about the cloud?". My CDI landscape talk from TSSJS 2011 was accepted as an alternative :-(. I also might be part the EJB 3.2 and Java EE 7 BOFs.

I can't but feel a little bummed that my other "uber cool" talks like the Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6 (brand new), Java EE 6 Portability (brand new), Java EE 6 caching across enterprise application tiers (TSSJS 2011) talks did not get accepted. I was also keeping my fingers crossed hoping that my CanDI talk would be accepted (I did have a Resin 4 talk last year though). All in all, I guess I have little to complain about. I could always do those at another conference or good JUG...

If you are attending JavaOne 2011, please do consider attending one of my sessions. I would love to chat with you in person!

CDI Talks at Research Triangle Park and DC/Nova Java User Groups

On June 27th I came back from a trip to the Raleigh, NC area to record a JavaLobby Tech Chat on Resin 4. The Tech Chat went great. Mitch Pronschinske, the Editor-in-Chief of JavaLobby/DZone drove the Chat. We talked about Resin 4, the Java EE 6 Web Profile, the Caucho team, the CDISource Spring/CDI bridge, Java EE 7/Java EE 8, WebSocket, cloud computing and the like. The Tech Chat should be out there on JavaLobby soon.

I chose to drive to NC to avoid the hassle of flying and because NC is quite drivable from my home office in Philly. On the way back, I did CDI demos at both the Research Triangle JUG and the NoVA/Washington, D.C. JUG. Both talks were very well attended. The interest/participation levels were fantastic. The DZone folks gave me a few nice printed copies of the CDI RefCard. Every single copy was taken and people were asking for more! They also asked me for the slide deck and code examples. I’ll send them to the JUG leads to post on the JUG websites. You can also take a look at the slide deck and code examples if you want and send me any follow-up questions. I also wanted to talk at the Maryland and Richmond JUGs but things didn’t quite work out schedule-wise this time around. Both JUGs are working on scheduling me to speak in the Fall instead.

TSSJS 2011 Round-Up

I spoke at TSSJS 2011 March 16-18 in Vegas. TSSJS 2011 went extremely well and so did my talks. I think the TSSJS 2011 agenda, quality of content/speakers and buzz was the best in years. The new TSS editor Cameron McKenzie did an admirable job at putting everything together.  Some of the notable speakers included James Gosling, Steve Harris (SVP Oracle), Adam Messinger (VP Oracle), Patrick Curran (JCP chair), Rod Johnson, Bill Burke, Adam Bien and Kirk Pepperdine.

I started the conference with a 5-minute lightning round presentation on Resin 4, the Java EE 6 Web Profile, Caucho vision, history, thought leadership, values, global footprint and growing customer base. The presentation seemed to go over well with a number of existing customers and developers reaching out to us afterwards. The first session on the first day of the conference I did was my enterprise caching talk titled “Effective Caching Across Enterprise Application Tiers”. The talk covers the different flavors of caching in the web (HTTP), presentation, application, domain, infrastructure (persistence) and resource (database) tiers using mechanisms like proxy caching (especially as supported by Resin), JSF/CDI @ApplicationScoped, @SessionScoped, @ConversationScoped, @ViewScoped, @RequestScoped scopes, passivation, EJB pooling, EJB thread-safe singletons, extended persistence contexts, JPA first (transactional) and second (shared) level caching, database connection pools, prepared statement caching, JCache as well as distributed caching APIs like Coherence, Terracotta, GigaSpaces, Infinispan, EHCache, JCS, SwarmCache and OSCache. The talk was very well attended, the Q&A was good and I got great feedback afterwards. In the evening, I participated in the “Meet the Authors” event. TSSJS gave away two copies of EJB 3 in Action (I am currently working on the second edition) and I signed both copies for the winners. I had a few engaging conversations on topics like EJB/Spring, authoring and the JCP during the course of the evening.

I started the second and busiest day of the conference with a panel titled “The Java Community Process: What’s Broken and How to Fix It”. This was a panel with Patrick Curran, James Gosling and me, moderated by Cameron McKenzie. We discussed the need for reforming the JCP, greater transparency, the Apache Harmony licensing issues, more non-Oracle spec leadership and more participation from non-vendor affiliated independents. We all agreed that many ills in the JCP can be cured through greater interest and participation from the developer community. The panel generated a great deal of interest, attendance, participation and feedback. After lunch, I gave my “A Quick Tour of the CDI Landscape” talk. The talk is a broad overview of the vibrant CDI landscape composed of implementations, supported runtimes, portable extensions and tools. I discussed Weld, CanDI, OpenWebBeans, GlassFish, JBoss AS, Resin, Geronimo, WebLogic, WebSphere, Tomcat, OpenEJB, TomEE, JOnAS, Seam 3, Apache MyFaces CODI, the ZK Framework, Arquillian, Forge, JBoss Tools, Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ. The audience was great and I had some lively discussions afterwards. Later in the afternoon, I did my Java EE testing talk titled “Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques”. The talk covers end-to-end testing along the entire Java EE stack including Servlet 3, JSF 2, EJB 3.1, JPA 2, JAX-WS and JAX-RS using existing and emerging tools like JUnit, HttpUnit, HtmlUnit, Cactus, Selenium, JSFUnit, embedded containers, embedded databases, Arquillian/ShrinkWrap, Resin JUnit integration support and soapUI. The talk was well attended and I got excellent feedback for the talk. It was only somewhat surprising that folks don’t realize how robust Java EE testing is with the latest release and tools like Arquillian. In the evening, I participated in the “Ask the Experts” session which also went very well.

The last day of the conference I presented my talk titled “An Introduction to Seam 3″.The talk discusses the relationship between CDI, Weld and Seam 3 as well as covering all the Seam 3 modules such as XML configuration, persistence, Faces, Servlet, JMS, REST, JavaScript remoting, security, internationalization/localization, exception handling, mail, cron, document generation, Spring interoperability, Wicket, GWT, Drools, jBPM, JBoss ESB and so on. Since it was towards the end of the conference the attendance was relatively sparse but the Q&A session was very good with a lively audience.

A number of folks asked for the slides and demo code, so the materials for the talks is posted here.

Speaking at DevIgnition 2010

On December 3rd, I spoke at DevIgnition 2010 in Washington, DC. This is basically a brand new local conference organized by Gray Herter of the DC/Nova JUG. Since I've spoken at the DC/Nova JUG quite a few times now, Gray invited me to come speak at the conference. I gave a talk on Spring 3/Java EE 6 integration titled "Java EE 6 Support in Spring 3". I talked about the support for Java EE 6 APIs like EJB 3.1, JSF 2, JPA 2, JAX-RS, JAX-WS and bean validation built into Spring 3. The talk went very well and the crowd was very enthusiastic. Fellow speakers Arun Gupta and Ryan Cuprak spoke at the conference as well.

I certainly look forward to speaking at DevIgnition next year.

Speaking at Oredev 2010

On November 8-12, I spoke at Oredev 2010. Oredev is a Scandinavian regional technology conference especially focusing on the Malmo, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark metropolitan areas. Aiming to be the "best developer conference on the planet" Oredev 2010 had an intriguing mix of Java, .NET, agile, dynamic languages, mobile and even a non-technical track covering an eclectic set of topics ranging from music, photography, sports/fitness as well as culinary arts.

I spoke on Java EE 6 as well as CDI/Weld/Seam 3. Both of my talks had decent attendance with good follow-up Q & A. There were other recognizable folks from the Java community speaking at Oredev as well including Arun Gupta, Ted Neward and Neal Ford. Overall, speaking at Oredev was a pleasant experience.

Speaking at Java2days 2010

I spoke at Java2Days 2010 on October 8-9. The conference was hosted again in Sofia, Bulgaria and targeted the greater Balkan region. This year’s conference went very well as it drew a larger and more enthusiastic crowd than in the previous year. The exuberant crowd was in stark contrast to the comparatively lackluster Java conferences in the United States and Western Europe.

All three of my sessions were well attended with excellent feedback from each of them. The session on CanDI titled “A Quick Tour of Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE” was especially well received with a full house and lively Q & A along with requests for the CanDI demo code. The audience for the Java EE 6 testing talk titled “Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques” was also very good. People were extremely surprised to see how easy and powerful testing has become with Java EE 6. The closing session for the conference was my talk on the JCP titled “A Look Inside the Java Community Process”. Towards the end of this session, Werner Keil from the JCP Executive Committee, joined in to present an update on Java SE 7 and 8. To conclude, all the JCP members present at the conference came on stage for the Q & A. The audience really enjoyed the JCP session and I received a lot of positive feedback on it.

I hope and look forward to presenting at the Java2Days conference again next year in beautiful, spirited, youthful Sofia, Bulgaria. It was also great to see my friends and fellow speakers Eugene Ciurana, John Willis, Arun Gupta, Vladimir Pavlov, Talip Ozturk, Andrew Lombardi, Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Werner Keil, Sasa Slavnic and many others.

JavaOne 2010 Round-Up

Overall, JavaOne 2010 was great personally.

The first session I did was the Resin 4 Java EE 6 Web Profile talk titled “Resin: A Light-footed Java EE 6 Web Profile Platform”. This was the first time Emil and I co-presented and I thought it went very well. The attendance was moderate but we had a number of good questions and a handful of folks asked for the slides/demo code afterwards. That same evening I did a CDI BOF with Dan Allen of Red Hat/JBoss and David Blevins of Apache OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB. The BOF was titled “Implementing CDI: Goals, Milestones, and Perspectives” and was well-attended. We had lively discussion around the current state of implementations, the CDI ecosystem as well as the future of CDI/Java EE.

My first talk for the second day of the conference was the Java EE testing talk with Debu titled “Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques”. It was a full house and the talk went very well although we ran out of time and could not demo JAX-WS/JAX-RS testing. The talk covered end-to-end testing along the entire Java EE stack including Servlet 3, JSF 2, EJB 3.1, JPA 2, JAX-WS and JAX-RS using existing and emerging tools like JUnit, HttpUnit, HtmlUnit, Cactus, Selenium, JSFUnit, embedded containers, embedded databases, Arquillian/ShrinkWrap, Resin JUnit integration support and soapUI. We got excellent feedback for the talk. It was only somewhat surprising that folks don’t realize how robust Java EE testing is with the latest release and tools like Arquillian. In the evening I did an EJB 3.1 BOF with Linda Demichael of Sun/Oracle, Mike Keith of Sun/Oracle, David Blevins of Apache OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB as well as Andy Rubinger of JBoss/Red Hat titled “Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) Community Discussion”. The attendance was moderate but the discussion was very lively.

The last session I did for the conference was on Wednesday. It was a panel with Adam Bien, Emmanuel Bernard of JBoss/Red Hat, Krasimir Semerdzhiev of SAP, Roberto Chinnici of Sun/Oracle, David Blevins of OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB and Jim Knutson of IBM titled “Java EE 6 Panel: What Do We Do Now?”. The panel was moderated by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine of Sun/Oracle. He blogged about the panel here. It was a full-house and we had very lively discussion.

I of course met up with the usual suspects from JBoss, SpringSource, Apache, Sun/Oracle, etc throughout the conference. I have some serious mixed feelings about the conference itself. The programming and organization was great but I could not help but feel that JavaOne was demoted. I think a lot of developers have this same sentiment and I hope Sun/Oracle will do better next time.

I got a chance to go out to a climbing gym with my friends in the Resin team. It was pretty cool considering I haven't done any serious rock climbing for a good few years although Nicole and I did go up Mount Saint Helen's the year before the last. I also went out to a folk rock gig one night with my friends from the Resin team - it wasn't too bad at all. I did get a chance to catch a couple of metal gigs at Slim's and Kimo's the other evenings. The gig at Slim's was particularly cool with relatively young guys in their twenties doing their own rendition of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Iron Maiden and AC/DC. They did a great job and it was great to see "classic" metal alive and well, even if it is in the bubble that San Francisco can be.

Java EE 6 Testing Talk at Harrisburg JUG

On September 16th, I did the Java EE 6 end-to-end testing talk at the Harrisburg JUG. The talk covered doing testing across the Java EE 6 API tiers using Unit, HttpUnit, HtmlUnit, Cactus, Selenium, JSFUnit, Arquillian/ShrinkWrap, Resin, soapUI, etc. It is the same talk I am doing at JavaOne 2010 so it is great preparation!

It was great to be back to the JUG again and seeing some familiar friendly faces (and some new ones) despite rotten weather on the day.

CDI Talk at San Diego and Silicon Valley Java User Groups

En-route to the Resin marketing/engineering meetings in San Diego/San Francisco, I did my CDI quick tour talk at the San Diego JUG on July 20th and Silicon Valley JUG on July 21st (the same talk I did for TSSJS 2010).

Both talks went very well. The San Diego JUG was relatively small but very lively. I got great feedback on the talk afterwards. The Silicon Valley JUG hosted at Google was larger but understandably a bit more sedate. I did get some very good questions though and some great feedback.

I look forward to speaking at both JUGs in the near future again.

Speaking at JBossWorld 2010

On June 23rd I spoke at JBossWorld 2010. It was a privilege to get invited to speak at JBossWorld again by Java champion Burr Sutter.

Titled "Spring+JBoss: So Happy Together", the talk was demo-driven and covered how to effectively use Spring with Hibernate/JPA, JSF, Hibernate Validator, RESTEasy/JAX-RS, JBossWS/JAX-WS, JBoss Transactions, JBoss Messaging, Drools, jBPM, and JBoss Snowdrop/Spring Deployer/EJB 3 on JBoss AS. The talk went very well and I got excellent feedback on it. I was originally  supposed to co-present the talk with Marius Bogoevici of JBoss but he could not attend at the last minute due to budget issues. He helped out with the demo a great deal so it was really a shame. If I get a chance, I plan to repeat the talk with a more Java EE-centric, vendor-neutral flavor with a title along the lines of "Spring Java EE 6 Support" and run it on GlassFish. Ideally, it would be great to co-present with someone from SpringSource.

While at JBossWorld, I met up with the usual suspects in the JBoss gang including Dan Allen, Emmanuel Bernard, Bill Burke, Jay Balunas and Pete Muir. I also got to meet Lincoln Baxter and Andrew Rubinger for the first time and thought they were great additions to the JBoss team.

I expected Boston to be a little on the boring side as far as music with any serious hard edge. As it turns out there are a few good places to go to in Boston including The Church (literally an old abandoned Church) at Fenway and the Middle East in Central Square. The Middle East in particular plays alternative, punk, goth, rock and metal (kind of like Trocadero in Philly). I lucked out and there was a decent Nu Metal gig to go to on the one evening I actually had a chance to get out.

JavaOne 2010 Talks Accepted!

I am very excited to have a number of talks at JavaOne this year. I and Emil (Caucho Technology Chief Evangelist) will be giving the Resin 4/Java EE 6 Web Profile talk that I presented as a keynote at TSSJS Vegas (titled "Resin: A Light-Footed Java EE 6 Web Profile Platform"). I am very pleased that I will be co-presenting with Debu again this year as well. We will be talking about testing Java EE 6 applications (titled "Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques"). We will cover EJB 3.1 embedded containers, CDI,  Arquillian/ShrinkWrap and OpenEJB and a lot of other Java EE 6 features/tools/techniques geared towards unit, integration and regression testing. Dan Allen, David Blevins and I will be giving a BOF on CDI implementations (titled "Implementing CDI: Goals, Milestones, and Perspectives"). We will discuss project goals, approach, features, status, milestones, road map, modular portable extensions and perspectives on the future directions for CDI. I'll also be taking part in a similarly structured panel organized by Alexis MP on Java EE 6 (titled "Java EE 6 Panel: What Do We Do Now?"). I am very proud to share the panel with the likes of Roberto Chinnici, Mike Keith, Gavin King and Adam Bien. The goal of the panel is really to try to have a two-way exchange of ideas with the community about how they see Java EE 6 effecting them and what they (and we as a group) see as paths into the future for enterprise Java. I imagine I might also be part of Java EE 6 and EJB 3.1 Expert Group "meet and greet" sessions.

I am just a little dissapointed that my talk on Spring 3 Java EE 6 support with Spring expert Josh Long did not get accepted and neither did my/Emil's talk on Java modularity (we would be talking about OSGi, Jigsaw, etc). In the scheme of things I guess this is a pretty petty complaint given that I am still getting to talk about a lot of the stuff that I care about and there is always the possibility of giving the talks at good JUGs. It is also the case that I get to do a variant of the Spring 3/Java EE 6 talk at JBossWorld (titled "Spring + JBoss: So Happy Together"). While at JavaOne, I'll try to get a book signing together for EJB 3 in Action (Debu should be game for that too).

If you do get a chance to attend JavaOne this year, please do consider attending a few of the sessions, especially the CDI BOF or the Java EE 6 Panel. While we can all try to do our best to bring solid ideas to Java EE, there really isn't any substitute for getting genuine constructive feedback and ideas from end-users of various stripes.

TSSJS Vegas 2010 Round-Up

Speaking at TSSJS Vegas this year was great. I got to do four talks - my Java EE 6 overview, a Resin demo, a CanDI/CDI demo as well as a talk on the JCP. The Resin talk was one of the keynotes for TSSJS. All talks were well attended and the crowd was great.

People seemed genuinely interested in Java EE 6, the Web Profile, CDI and Resin. I got a ton of questions for Q&A, one-on-one afterwards as well as at the Caucho booth. Folks were particularly interested in some of the CDI/EJB 3.1 features as well as the Resin portable extensions for JUnit, iBATIS, Quartz, using EJB annotations on managed beans, etc. A good number of people asked for the example code both for the CanDI and Resin demo talks (both demos have been posted on the Caucho site already).

I personally enjoyed taking about the importance of open participation in the JCP although it was a relatively short and non-technical talk. Attendees at the talk asked some very intelligent questions and showed a great deal of engagement/interest, which was very heartening. I also got to talk to a few EJB 3 in Action readers as well as TSS readers, which is always fantastic.

CDI Talk at NYC JUG

I did a CDI talk at the NYC JUG on January 26. The crowd was great as I had expected from talking at the JUG in the past. It was great to see JUG leader and friend Dario doing a fantastic job of constantly growing this JUG from it's humble beginnings. I look forward to speaking at the JUG again soon, perhaps on Resin or OSGi/Java modularity.

Speaking at TSSJS Europe, 2009

On October 27-28, I spoke at TSSJS Europe 2009 in Prague, Czech Republic. I did an EJB 3.1 Preview as well as my Spring/EJB 3 integration talk. Both talks went well and were well-attended. The attendance for TSSJS Europe itself seemed to be a little on the low-end - hopefully that will change as the EU economy slowly recovers.

While in Prague, I was invited to talk to the NetBeans team led by Petr Jiricka. We exchanged ideas on adding better support for JSF 2, JPA 2, CDI and EJB 3.1 for NetBeans. After talking with the NetBeans team, I finally gave NetBeans an honest spin and was very impressed by it compared to the IDE I have been using for a few years. Indeed, I am now using NetBeans quite happily, although I am yet to try out the latest version of IDEA to see how it compares.

Speaking at Java2Days, Bulgaria

On October 8-9, 2009 I spoke at Java2Days in Sofia, Bulgaria. I got to do four different talks - my Java EE 6 Overview, an EJB 3.1 Preview, my EJB 3/Spring integration talk as well as my JPA/database performance optimization talk. The crowd was great and it was great to try and reach out to Java developers in Eastern Europe. This was the first time this conference was organized and I think it was truly a success. Just in terms of attendance, they surpassed some of the US based conferences, not to mention the enthusiasm level of the attendees.

The Bulgarians, including organizers Emo, Eva and Yoana were excellent hosts. Bulgaria truly is a rapidly flourishing country with a long, proud history, a vibrant multicultural community and a rich, colorful cultural tapestry. I look forward to speaking at Java2Days and Eastern Europe in general in the future. It was most definitely both a privilege and an honor to speak in a gem of a country emerging from behind the Iron Curtain.

It was also great to spend some time with my fellow co-presenters and friends Josh Long, Talip Ozturk, John Willis, Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Rob Harrop of SpringSource, Heath Kesler and Andrew Lombardi.

Speaking at JBossWorld

I spoke at JBossWorld last month. I gave my personal favorite Java EE 6/Spring framework comparison/contrast talk. The crowd at JBossWorld was fantastic and I got to talk to some EJB 3 in Action readers. I really love this talk because it gives me a chance to cover in-depth what I see in the two mainstream Java server-side stacks that I care about. In particular, I had a more philosophical bend on this talk that goes to the heart of each stack as opposed just a superficial talk about mechanical features. I hope to give this talk again soon and really liked how it panned out this time, despite the chronic SpringSource objections to this talk and complaints that it's somehow "unfair" to them.

Such is how some people think I guess and that's a real shame. Not everything in life is about cynical pursuits, selling something or making money (in fact I can only imagine how hollow and meaningless that might feel). It is sometimes possible to set ones selfish interests aside and analyze for the sake of pure inquiry to try to find the truth about something one cares about. I think that is when we are all at our very best as scientists, engineers, craftsmen and artists...that's our craft at its very best, not at its cynical worst.

At any rate, besides the conference it was great to hang out with the usual suspects at JBoss - Dan Allen, Emmanuel Bernard, Bill Burke, Jay Balunas, etc. It was also great to finally meet Pete Muir, the head honcho for Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (JSR 299) reference implementation from JBoss. I thought he was a first-class engineer and a true gentleman.

JavaOne Round Up

Speaking at JavaOne was great.

Considering it was my first time it went great, even the collaborative ones with Debu and David that requires a little bit of juggling. I talked to a whole bunch of people from all over the globe, including my good friend Dan Allen of Seam in Action, Ken Saks (EJB 3.1 and GlassFish lead), Mike Keith (EJB 3.0 lead), Linda DeMichael (JPA 2, EJB 3.0 lead), Adam Bien (fellow EG member of EJB3.1/Java EE 6, Java champion), Emmanuel Bernard (Bean Validation lead) and so many others. David blogged about it a little here on our EJB 3.0 embedded containers talk. San Fran itself was great...I found quite a few places to hang out in the evening and listen to some hard edged music :-). China town was great too...

While I was out there, I also spoke at the San Francisco JUG. I did my Spring/EJB 3 integration talk and shared talks with Talip Ozturk of Hazelcast. The talk went great and the crowd was great. Shaun Abram, the fellow independent consultant that invited me there blogged about the talk here. Vinay Nag blogged about it too here. Thanks guys!!

While I was at JavaOne, I also talked to Steve Montal, Scott Ferguson and Emil Ong about working on the EJB 3.1 Lite container of Resin for it's impending Java EE 6 Web Profile certification next year (finally!!). Emil attended my SF JUG talk too and gave me very good feedback. The Resin guys rock! Caucho rocks and we're sure to make some waves in server-side Java together in the next year :-).