Reza Rahman's Java Blog

JavaOne 2011 Round-Up

2011-10-16T15:13:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-07-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-11T19:43:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-29T22:05:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-05-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T19:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T20:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T20:12:00.000-07:00

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 :-).

Speaking at JavaOne 2009

2009-03-01T17:29:00.000-08:00

Your humble author is very proud and excited to declare that he will be speaking at two sessions for JavaOne 2009! One of them is a technical session while the other is a birds-of-a-feather. The technical session is the JPA/database performance tuning talk I recently gave at the Harrisburg JUG. I am co-presenting the session with EJB 3 in Action lead author Debu Panda from Oracle. The birds-of-a-feather session is on the uses of embedded EJB 3 containers. I am co-presenting with David Blevins of Apache OpenEJB for this session. Apache OpenEJB is one of the originators of the EJB 3 embedded container concept being standardized in EJB 3.1. I will also try to be part of the EJB 3.1 and Java EE 6 "meet the experts" sessions that are very likely for JavaOne this year.

If you are attending JavaOne 2009, please do consider attending the sessions. I would love to chat with you. I and Debu will also try to schedule a JavaOne book signing via Manning. Remember, the lull of a recession is a great time to update skills and make new connections, not to mention taking a brief break in San Francisco away from work.

Speaking at TheServerSide Java Symposeum

2009-03-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

I am very excited to say that I will be speaking at TheServerSide Java Symposium in March at Las Vegas. Over the past few months, I've developed a close relationship with the folks at TSS having written my EJB 3.1 Preview Series and Java EE 6 Preview article. I hope to be even more involved in online communities like TSS, JavaLobby and JavaRanch going forward.

I will be speaking on Spring/EJB 3 integration. This is the same talk I gave at the Connecticut JUG conference last year. Although I know a few folks that have done this kind of integration, the talk would be a great way for me to gauge community interest in this topic as a precursor to getting more engaged with an initiative for EJB 3.1 Lite native support on the Spring framework. I have been talking to the SpringSource folks about it and hope that the effort might be sponsored/supported by these folks. I am also giving a more informal "fire-side chat" on Java EE 6.

If you are attending the conference, please do consider coming to the sessions. I would love to chat with you on either topic or anything else you might want to talk about. Remember, the lull of a recession is a great time to update skills and make new connections, not to mention taking a brief break in Las Vegas away from work.

Spring JPA Support Talk at the Charleston JUG

2009-03-01T15:55:00.000-08:00

On February 26th, I went back to the Charleston, SC JUG to fill in for a speaker that dropped out at the last minute. JUG leader Jason McDonald requested that I talk about Spring's support for JPA (material we cover in the last chapter of EJB 3 in Action - "EJB 3 and Spring"; the talk updates the content to cover Spring 2.5). The code for the very hands-on presentation should be posted on the JUG's website soon.

Jason let me know that the JUG needs more people involved in a leadership role since he is really being strained to manage the JUG on top of his already hectic schedule. If you live near the Charleston area, please consider getting in touch with Jason. The Charleston JUG is actually very well funded and organized thanks to Jason's efforts and can fully sponsor speakers from across the country. It also has a great host in BenefitFocus (a major tech vendor for one of my Philadelphia based clients). Given the small number of JUGs in the South, it would be a shame to not see this one reach its full potential. I certainly enjoyed speaking there and would go back there again.

I also encourage you to become a member of the JUG and help it grow if you are a local Java developer. JUGs are a great vehicle for developing grassroots Java communities, not to mention for keeping up-to-date in a fast-paced industry and for developing life-long friendships with fellow developers.

JPA/Database Tuning Talk at the Harrisburg JUG

2009-03-01T15:36:00.000-08:00

On February 19th, I did one of my most favorite talks at the Harrisburg JUG. Titled "Keeping a Relational Perspective for Optimizing JPA", the talk is about some of the database centric performance tuning techniques I've utilized for JPA (and the persistence tier in general) over the years. I am very glad I finally found a JUG interested in this relatively advanced talk!

As usual, the Harrisburg crowd was great and I'm proud to say I once worked in the central PA area. Indeed, it seems to be one of the few areas in PA that seems to be enjoying vibrant economic growth, despite national trends recently.

Java EE 6 Preview at the NYC JUG

2009-03-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

On January 26th, I went back to the NYC JUG to give a preview of Java EE 6. Despite the unmistakable market crash in the NYC area, turnout was very good and folks seemed relatively upbeat.

I went out for Dinner with JUG leader Dario and some of the other JUG members after the talk. The NYC JUG is always a pleasure because of the quality and dynamism of the crowd. I look forward to going back there soon after I get some of the things that have been on my plate done (like updating the EJB 3 in Action code samples for JBoss 5 and GlassFish v2 as well as writing IDE setup instructions for Eclipse/NetBeans that a lot of readers have been asking us for).

Java EE 6 Preview at the NoVA JUG

2009-03-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

I did my Java EE 6 preview talk at the NoVA JUG on January 8th. It was really great to see that the JUG has grown significantly since I spoke there last. The feedback from this crucial metropolitan area was great and the talk was very interactive.

My good friend Dan Allen, the author of Seam in Action showed up for the meeting and did a great job explaining some of the JSR 299 (aka WebBeans, aka Java Contexts and Dependency Injection) functionality. I was a little sad to hear that he has abandoned the independent consulting path in favor of joining the JBoss team. He is now very active with JSR 299 and appears to be getting ready to write JCDI in Action via Manning. I wish him the best of the luck on the book. I think he did a great job on Seam in Action.

EJB 3.1 Talk at the NYC JUG

2008-11-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

I gave a preview of EJB 3.1 at the NYC JUG on the 6th of November. I have to say this was one of the best speaking experiences I've had in a while. True to the intent of the talk, the crowd was very interactive and asked a number of excellent questions. The feedback on the EJB 3.1 changes was very positive and there were a number of EJB 3 in Action readers there. It was clear this was a crowd of people with a much deeper level of professionalism than the run-of-the-mill "just a paycheck" types. It was great to see and I look forward to my next talk for the JUG on Java EE 6!

EJB 3 Primer at the Charleston JUG

2008-11-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

On October 28th, I traveled all the way south to beautiful Charleston, SC to give a slightly belated EJB 3 primer! JUG leader Jason McDonald is trying hard to grow the fledgling Charleston JUG. The turnout was less than what we were expecting, but it was a pleasure to speak to the small group nonetheless.

Since this was my first time in the "deep south" I didn't quite know what to expect. As it turns out, the folks in Charleston are true to the image of southern hospitality. And Charleston really is "the last bastion of southern charm and elegance". I definitely look forward to speaking in Charleston again and wish the JUG the best of luck.

Java EE 6 and EJB 3/Spring 2.5 Integration Talks in Connecticut

2008-11-09T17:16:00.000-08:00

On October 21st, the CT JUG lead by Ryan Cuprak helds its first ever Java Conference. The conference was a very good success and I think met an important need for the large number of Java developers in the greater Connecticut area.

I gave my Java EE 6 preview talk, as well as my brand new talk about integrating EJB 3 and Spring 2.5. Both talks were very well received and the EJB 3/Spring 2.5 integration talk generated a lot of lively discussion. Since the talk, a number of people asked for the source code for the very hand-on talk. It is downloadable from the CT JUG website here.

There were a number of other excellent talks given at the conference. Doug Clark from Oracle spoke on Coherence support for their open source JPA implementations (TopLink, EclipseLink) and Rossen Stoyanchev from SpringSource talked about Spring 2.5 as well as 3.0. JUG leader Ryan Cuprak himself gave a Seam talk to a full-house crowd.

Your Ideas for the Second Edition of EJB 3 in Action

2008-10-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

We are deeply grateful to our readership for making EJB 3 in Action the kind of success that has exceeded all of our expectations. This is especially true considering widespread EJB 2 bashing, the maturity of EJB as a pioneer middleware technology and the authors' relative humble roots.

We are now in the very early stages of planning the second edition and could really use your help. The second edition is slated to cover the emerging EJB 3.1, WebBeans 1.0 and JPA 2.0 specifications. We plan on adding content on testing as well as covering the EJB integration features in Spring 2.5. Beyond this content, what else would you like to see in a second edition EJB 3 book? More best practices? Performance tuning? Product/vendor selection help? Others?

Should we continue to treat EJB 3/Java EE 5 beginners as first-class citizens? Is a real-world example driven format compelling to you? Is there a need for us to become more of a reference book? Should we cover ground that's less traveled or continue to focus on crystallizing key concepts and covering features most likely to be used in realistic EJB 3 projects?

Please do feel welcome in sending me comments at reza_rahman@lycos.com. My co-authors -- Debu Panda (debupanda at gmail dot com) and Rob Di Marco (robdimarco at gmail dot com) would love to hear your ideas as well.

Java EE 6 Preview at the Philadelphia JUG

2008-10-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

On September 30th, I gave my Java EE 6 preview talk at the Philly JUG. Run by Dave Fecak of JSync, the Philly JUG is one of the most successful ones in the world. The attendance was very good and so was the level of discussion, specially considering the size of the JUG. There was a lot of excitement around Java EE 6 and I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk itself. I am hoping a number of folks will send their comments directly to the EG by emailing jsr-316-comments@jcp.org. I spoke at the Philly JUG about a year ago on Spring and EJB 3. It was a pleasure giving that talk as well.

It's also always great to work with Dave. He has done an amazing job keeping the community engaged and growing the JUG.

Java EE 6 Preview at the Harrisburg JUG

2008-10-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

On September 18, I gave a preview of Java EE 6 at the Harrisburg JUG. The level of participation in this JUG is always great to see, especially since this is my old turf. I spoke about there about a year ago on EJB 3 and Spring. I am speaking there again in January about optimizing relational databases for JPA. It was truly encouraging to receive a lot of good feedback on the Java EE 6 APIs.

Java EE 6 Preview at the Princeton JUG

2008-10-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

On September 8, I gave my Java EE 6 preview presentation at the nearby Princeton JUG. The attendance was great and so was the participation levels. Folks were very excited about all the APIs in Java EE 6 and provided a lot of positive feedback. Java champion, JDJ editor and JUG leader Yakov Fain blogged about the presentation here.

I have always enjoyed speaking with Yakov. He is a true Java veteran who always has well balanced insight into what is going on in the Java world. I look forward to speaking at the Princeton JUG again soon.

The Developer Conference, Sao Paulo Brazil

2008-10-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

On July 25-26, I spoke at The Developer Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I presented on both Java EE 6 and EJB 3.1. Both talks were very well received and there was a very good level of participation. Burr Sutter from JBoss and Ed Burns from Sun also spoke at the conference. It is one of the largest Java centric conferences in Brazil, run by a great company named GlobalCode.

This was my first time to Brazil. It is truly a very warm, hospitable and lively country. It is clearly also a global IT powerhouse with a strong Java community. I received a lot of positive feedback on EJB 3, Java EE 5 as well as Seam. Not surprisingly, there was also a great deal of excitement around EJB 3.1, WebBeans and Java EE 6. I hope I will continue to hear from the Java EE community in Brazil.

We recently published the Portuguese version of EJB 3 in Action and from all accounts, the translation seems to be doing very well. I signed quite a few copies and talked to readers in person in the conference bookstore.

EJB 3 in Action JBoss 4.2 Example Code Posted

2008-06-02T18:09:00.000-07:00

I just finished porting the example code of EJB 3 in Action to JBoss 4.2. The code is posted on the Manning site for EJB 3 in Action. Here is a link to the code.

This means that readers can now get up and running with either GlassFish, Oracle AS or JBoss. In addition, Debu is almost done with the WebLogic 10 port. As soon as JBoss 5 is finally released (about time already!), I'll update the code to work on the official Java EE 5 compliant release.

In the meanwhile, I'd love to hear from you guys as to what application server you would like to see supported. How about OpenEJB with Tomcat? WebSphere 7? WebSphere Community Edition? Shoot me an email and let me know.

JPA/Hibernate 3 Lab at the Connecticut JUG

2007-10-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

On September 18th, I conducted a JPA/Hibernate 3 lab at the Connecticut JUG. I allowed people to use either NetBeans 5.5 or Eclipse Dali. This was the first ever lab they had ever done at the JUG and everything worked out quite nicely for a hands-on lab.

Personally, I would do a few things differently the next time I do this lab. Firstly, I think I have to allow just one IDE (probably Eclipse). Two IDEs are just too difficult to support in a single session. Secondly, I think I need to have all required software available for distribution on the spot. No matter how many times you say it, people never seem to come prepared. Lastly, I think this lab needs to be about two-and-a-half hours to cover JPA to a reasonable degree. By the time I am done setup and running, the allotted time is over!

As usual, it was a pleasure to talk with JUG leader Ryan. He is one of the most down-to-earth people in the Java field that I know. In a field full of ego-maniacs, this is definitely refreshing.

Embedded JBoss Container Talk at Philly JBUG

2007-10-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

On September 18, Rob Di Marco spoke on the JBoss Embedded Container at the Philadelphia JBoss User Group. The Embeddable container allows you to use the full power of EJB 3 and JPA outside a container. Rob walked through examples of using EJB 3 in a standalone application, in a unit test as well as in Tomcat.

Embeddable containers are timely and useful innovations that allow the adoption of EJB 3 as a truly lightweight development framework. It is also an important mechanism for using EJB 3 inside existing Spring+Tomcat applications.

Besides JBoss the JOnAS and Geronimo communities have also created embeddable EJB 3 containers that can work with Tomcat. From all indications, these innovations are seeing quite a bit of success. With the advent of Java EE 6, I expect these type of innovations to receive "official" blessing.

I am trying to muster some time to write a few articles on embeddable containers as well as deploy the EJB 3 in Action example code to a few of them. After I am done, I'll make the deployment scripts available through the book's page on Manning.com.

EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate Comparison at Philly JUG

2007-10-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

On September 26 I presented my EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate comparison talk at the Philly JUG. The Philly JUG is among the most successful JUGs in the world. It is consistently ranked in the top 25 in the U.S. and the top 50 in the world. I received great feedback on the talk and a lot of folks were very interested in what I had to say. In fact, this is the first time in it's lifetime the Philly JUG reached its capacity attendance of a hundred-and-fifty people!

I finished off the talk with a preview of EJB 3.1 and Java EE 6. I sold a few copies of EJB 3 in Action and received feedback on the book from people who already have copies. I look forward to speaking at the Philly JUG in the future.

EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate Comparison at NoVAJUG

2007-08-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

On the 15th of this month, I presented my popular EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate comparison talk at the Northern Virginia Java User Group (NoVAJUG). This bunch was by far the most lively I have ever seen. I always thought of the DC area to be filled with sedate government employee types. Nothing could be farther from the truth!

There were a number of people in the crowd who have used both EJB 2.x and Spring+Hibernate in a production environment and have explored EJB 3 (the room was filled to capacity). To be truthful, it felt a little bit like preaching to the choir, and I picked up a number of pretty good ideas from the crowd.

Folks pointed out the EJB 3 deployment, performance tuning, clustering and administration support for Java EE application servers like WebLogic 10. Someone suggested a performance benchmark for both the stacks. I thought that was an excellent idea. I'll talk it over with Debu and see what he thinks...I know Oracle produced a benchmark comparing EJB 3 and EJB 2.x. I wonder if they could produce one for Spring+Hibernate and the Oracle AS EJB 3 container + TopLink JPA provider? It would be a very intriguing experiment indeed...

Real World Java Seminar at NYC Roosevelt Hotel

2007-08-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

I spoke at the Real World Java Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC on the 13th of this month. I gave my popular EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate comparison talk to a full-house audience. I think SYS-CON (the publishers of the widely read Java Developers Journal) had the right idea hosting this seminar. The one-day seminar was well-attended, even in the slow month of August. Given the number of Java developers on the East Coast there really is a lot of room for a large JavaOne style event. I know the travel expenses are a big deterrent for many people to go to JavaOne.

To some degree, the regional No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) symposiums kind of bridge that gap, but something like Real World Java can be a great success. I hope SYS-CON repeats the event in the coming years. I would certainly be delighted to speak there again.

Besides giving the talk, I got to speak with a number of Java folks like Jeremy Geelan (VP of SYS-CON), Reema Patel (Sun Evangelist), Mark Pollack (one of the Interface21 guys involved in Spring.NET) and Mark Richards (senior architect at IBM). I got positive feedback from a bunch of EJB 3 in Action readers too!

JPA+Hibernate 3 Tutorial at NYC JUG

2007-08-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

On the 2nd of this month I gave a very hands on tutorial to JPA using Hibernate 3 at the NYC JUG. It went surprisingly smooth and actually turned out to be very interactive for a lab format talk. I can't wait to see how things turn out when I repeat the talk in Connecticut next month.

I have to say this was one of the most charming groups I've talked at. The room in the New Yorker hotel was cramped as is everything in NYC, packed full of very young, very bright people from all over the World. It really felt like an intense environment where only "hardboiled" coders roam...

I was delighted to find out the JUG leader Dario is conducting a well-attended training course on EJB 3. I look forward to talking there again and maybe collaborating with Dario on a joint project sometime in the near future.

Java EE 6 Coming Soon!

2007-07-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

I am very excited to hear that the JCP process for Java EE 6 is starting! Here is a link to the JSR! It is slated as JSR 316. Instead of being on the side-lines, I joined the JSR committee this time on. I joined as an "independent expert" and will contribute my views on how to improve on the spec (the EJB3/JPA spec in particular).

Most encouragingly, Rod Johnson is apparently looking forward to joining the committee too. This is definitely a welcome development that has many good implications for the Java EE standard!

Feel free to email me your ideas on how to improve the next Java EE version! I'll try my best to represent the ideas in the JCP...

EJB 3 Introduction at Harrisburg JUG

2007-06-03T19:47:00.001-07:00

On the 17th of last month I gave an introductory talk on EJB 3 at the Harrisburg JUG. It was really nice to be back on my old turf, it is a reminder that life is not as hectic in the Northeast's hinterlands. The turnout for the talk was great. The audience was one was extremely active and savvy. By and large, I think the demographic was significantly younger too.

The talk was a lot of fun and gave me a chance to present some of the introductory material in the book. The talk was not as hands-on as I would have liked. This probably wouldn't have been practical given the time allocation and the amount of material to cover. However, I'm hoping to give a JPA/Hibernate 3 talk at the NYC JUG soon. I'm aiming to make that extremely hands-on. I'm even toying with the idea of a code-along. I may also repeat that talk at the Connecticut JUG if all goes well.

EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate Comparison Talk at Connecticut JUG

2007-05-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

On the 8th I had my EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate comparison talk at the Connecticut JUG. I didn't realize exactly how big this JUG was. There was a very large turnout and good audience participation. The JUG leader Ryan Cuprak posted a very nice review for the presentation on the JUG site. It is always good to hear when people receive one's efforts well.

I think the crowd was heavy on the EJB 2.x side because of all the larger insurance companies in and around Hartford. There were actually a number of people using Entity Beans who were particularly happy about the new features introduced in JPA. Ryan asked me to return in a few months for a JPA/Hibernate 3 specific talk. In the meanwhile, I'm trying to get Ryan in touch with a few of the Spring/Interface21 folks. Apparently, they have not had a intro Spring talk yet, although some JUG members are using Spring in production environments.

The same concern over WebSphere EJB 3 support came up again. I really hope IBM has gotten it's efforts in gear. Someone also asked about the better annotation support for DI in Spring 2.1. I couldn't really tell them much. I've read some vague things here and there and am anxious to see the concrete road map for 2.1. The gradual gravitation towards annotations is definitely encouraging. I still suspect Spring will remain a highly configurable DI/AOP container at heart instead of an EJB-like platform with a lot of high-level constructs. In either case, I've always found mucking around in verbose, messy XML a pain, so Spring annotation support has to come as a pleasant development for a lot of folks.

EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate Comparison Talk at Princeton JUG

2007-04-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday I had my EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate comparison talk at the nearby Princeton JUG. This was the first leg of my tour to promote EJB 3 in Action and the EJB 3 technology in general.
The talk went extremely well. I got good attendance and a very decent level of audience participation. The folks at Princeton are definitely a very lively bunch and I hope to talk there again. Of course, I wasn't too surprised given that Yakov Fain leads this JUG. I've always had a great amount respect for Yakov. He is a veteran Java champion and one of the most well balanced and cool heads I have ever met. I am trying hard to get him to come down to Philly for a talk, perhaps on Adobe Flex/server-side Java integration.

It was good to see that a lot of people are very receptive of EJB 3. In general, the biggest concern was the availability of container support, particularly from the larger vendors like BEA and IBM. I have to admit that this is a very valid concern. Thus far, the only containers that are really Java EE 5 certified are Oracle AS and Sun's Glassfish. Although the JBoss crowd were instrumental in the spec itself, JBoss AS is yet to get Java EE certified, particularly because of their slow pace in implementing the Web Services functionality in the new spec. Fortunately, the projected release of WebLogic 10 next month is going to go a long way in assuaging app server support concerns. It is a shame the WebSphere effort has not gathered more steam yet...

It was also nice to see that people were seriously considering JPA providers other than Hibernate such as Oracle TopLink and BEA Kodo. Product diversity is always good for the Java standard and the Java community in general.

Burr Sutter Speaks at Philly JBUG

2007-04-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

My company, Tripod Technologies, hosted the first Philadelphia JBoss User Group meeting this past Tuesday. We had Burr Sutter from JBoss speak on JBoss ESB. In case you are not familiar with Burr, he is a current Java champion, founder of the Atlanta JUG and manager of the JBoss ESB team.

I was a little apprehensive about how many people we would get for this meeting, given that the group has been dormant for a while. As it turns out, about forty people showed up at the Unisys center in Malvern, PA. Not a bad turnout for the first meeting of a "specialty" user group. Let's hope we can keep up the momentum. To that end, I'm trying my best to schedule someone else of Burr's caliber to come and speak. Among other things, I'm thinking of having someone speak about JBoss Seam and Groovy. I'm hoping to get a session or two in for EJB 3 as well.

I was really impressed by Burr's presentation too. I think this is the first time I've seen a coherent, unambiguous view of what ESB really is. I can only imagine that this clarity translates to the vision and implementation of the JBoss ESB product as well, although I haven't gotten a chance to play around with it first-hand myself. The Philly JBUG site will post a copy of his excellent presentation soon (right now we are a little limited for hosting space). For now, you can download it from my website.

If you attended the meeting, I hope you liked what you saw and will spread the word. We are trying our best to deliver something that is useful to the overall Java community in Philly. I think this means reaching beyond the world of purely JBoss-centric talks. Another interesting idea is to have people in the local area talk about cool work that they do at their job. Personally, I've always found that very insightful rather than hearing about yet another product or technology I may or may not use. It gives "ordinary" developers a chance to showcase what they've accomplished too and gives me a good idea of what is going on in the local area.

If you are so inclined, do send me feedback about the JBUG. I'd really like to hear what people out there are really interested in getting out of user groups. I'm especially interested in knowing about specific speakers and topics you'd like to see at the Philly JBUG.

Launching an EJB Community Site

2007-02-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

Having emerged from writing EJB 3 in Action, both I and my co-author Debu Panda were feeling a slight void this past month or so. This past week, an interesting thought filled the void--starting an open-source style community site surrounding the EJB ecosystem.

A similar idea was pursued by Kito Mann when he launched JSF central. JSF central aims to provide something Sun can't provide because they are a big business, Server-side, Javalobby or Java.net can't provide because their focus is too broad and Apache MyFaces can't provide because they are a specific implementation of the JSF standard. JSF central essentially provides a community centered around a pretty widely-used Java standard. We think the next logical candidate for this great idea is EJB 3. In fact, I believe server-side was originally rooted around EJB 2.1 but eventually broadened its focus (please feel free correct me if this is not true).

True to Kito's original idea, we are thinking of calling the website EJB central. Similar to JSF central, we are planning to have news, articles, books, EJB 3 products and resources sections. In addition, we also want to have forums, project spotlights for the early adopters of EJB 3 and an incubator for solutions around EJB 3 such as patterns, APIs, reusable components and interceptors. Perhaps most interestingly, we are thinking of creating a lightweight EJB 3 tutorial maintained by the community.

Like Wikipedia, any registered community member will be able
to contribute to the EJB 3 tutorial including adding content, refining code samples or just proofeading. We are hoping to create one of the best resources for learning EJB 3 effectively with the active help of energetic and altruistic "committers" to the tutorial. Initially I and Debu will seed the content and see where things gravitate...

Once we hash around a few more ideas, we'll probaby start the hard work of creating the template/content, registering the domain and finding a suitable host very soon. The site is going to be written on a JSF/EJB 3 stack (what could be more appropriate? :)). We haven't decided on a container quite yet, but I'm seriously eye-balling OpenEJB.

If you have a helpful idea or comment, definitely drop me note!