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A lot of great things are called prologue these days ;-) My thumb still hurts from driving the Audi R8 for three consecutive hours trying to beat my lap time on the Eiger Nordwand. Still gotta buy one of these.

JavaOne 2008 is around the corner and closing in fast. It’s gonna be quite the busy schedule. It would probably be a wise idea to take the week off afterwards, but somehow I guess it ain’t gonna happen. Besides the regular schedule there’s a couple of BoFs at night that I want to attend too. Then there is the “party index”, courtesy of Wilfred Springer.

Rumour has it that this year’s Afterdark will feature SMASHMOUTH, an alternative rock band from San Jose, California. Never heard of them, but sounds great, so time for some bittorrent research ;-) Actually, it’s not rumours, but taken from an official Sun web page.

Coming Thursday, Sun Microsystems hosts a NLJUG JavaOne warm-up event in their local HQ in the Netherlands. A few dozens of Dutchmen will meet up and discuss their pilgrimage to San Francisco. If you’re reading this, you’re Dutch, and you’re going to JavaOne as well…please sign up at the NLJUG/JavaOne web site and you can also enjoy a Sonoma County wine-tour, and a great party on Sunday! But be quick...we're closing deals with the tour operator tomorrow. If you ain't Dutch…we cannot be bribed…but, you can always give it a try ;-)

This blog entry is a combined piece of coverage for JavaPolis days 3, 4, and 5, in other words: The Conference. I have several reasons for doing this not in the least because of the very busy schedule and the bizarre problems I ran into with the wireless provider at the hotel. It appeared that the access that I bought from within my hotel room was not working when I sat in the lobby. This is strange, right? Must be some sort of a router thing. Anyway I’m only able to login to my account when I’m at the third floor of the hotel :-S

Besides the significant amout of time spent at the lobby and the hotel bar discussing everything we got out of the conference, I also spent most of the nights at the conference venue, attending BoF sessions and participating in all other sorts of get-togethers. Quite a busy schedule and most of the time when I finally saw my hotel room – and specifically the bed – I had little to none energy left to put anything on the blog. So I decided to craft up some snippets during the conference days and put it all out at once in a single blog entry.

First thing that really got me impressed at the conference is that they succeeded in getting wireless internet to work! This is quite amazing compared to past years. Imagine 3200+ nerds inside the venue with laptops, wifi enabled phones, pdas, watches, and even pacemakers all connecting to the internet at the very same time. Great job, guys!

Another great thing is the massive number of interesting speakers gathered at this conference. Not only the keynotes feature A-list speakers, but also a lot of the regular conference sessions feature rock star speakers, well-known authors, and JSR spec leads. A perfect opportunity to get the information from the source.

Day 3 and 4 both featured keynotes in the morning. Speakers included Stephan Janssen, James Gosling, Bruce Eckel, and the Sun Java Evangelists team. Topics included JavaFX, Flex, OpenSpaces (UnConference), Mobile Java, and James Gosling presented an overview of what’s happening on the Java platform. He talked about lots of anecdotes on customer visits and mad scientist-like projects that involved some sort of Java.

After the keynote on Wednesday, the actual conference part of JavaPolis took off. The conference consists of 1-hour sessions with from time-to-time very hard choices to make what session to attend since there are quite some interesting topics to choose from.  Amongst others I picked the following sessions that I will comment on in the remainder of this post: Guice, Java Content Repository, Java EE 6 Overview, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, Hibernate Search, Web Beans, ..  and finally a panel that featured e.g. James Gosling, Josh Bloch, Neal Gafter and Martin Odersky that talked about the future of computing. A lot of interesting stuff as you can tell from just the list of topics.

Besides in-depth sessions there is also a nice, but far too crowded pavilion. Especially around lunch time one can have a hard time getting across the pavilion floor in order to get something to eat or find a toilet in time ;-) The pavilion floor featured dozens of product vendors pushing their product or recruiting new employees. One of the booths featured a setup with Gran Turismo where you could win some prizes by driving a BMW 1-series around the track. As I’m a big fan of the game and can spent quite some time playing it every now and then I gave it a try, but unfortunately drove a disappointing time.

Just like last year my blog was featured on the backpage of the daily JavaPolis newspaper, which is nice of course!

So off to some session content:

Actually the first conference session that I attended was on the dependency injection framework Guice by (Crazy) Bob Lee who works for Google. My expectations were some sort of introduction but instead Bob had labeled the talk “Expert Guice” and took off with such speed that I had a really hard time figuring out the merits of the framework during the presentation and I’m still not sure if I got a grab on it yet. Anyway, it gave me an impression.

The second talk I attended was titled “AJAX meets Java Content Repository” by some Swiss guy and boy, he did a great job presenting. Not only did he do a perfect job talking about the subject but you could tell he was into all of the secrets of Keynote on the Mac as his slides were a feast for the eyes as well. He concluded the presentation by having a stopwatch counting down 15 minutes and coded a demo against time. Impressive job! And by the way JCR is impressive stuff as well.

Next was a session on Java EE 6 that did feature lots of news around the developments within this JSR. At JavaOne there was only some vague information available as the expert group still had to start. As they are currently under way for about 6 months quite some work has already been done in defining the roadmap and the global features of the platform. Of course, since it’s still early in the process a lot of it is still subject to change. Amongst the more interesting developments within this JSR is the concept of Profiles. These should be regarded as subsets or supersets of the Java EE platform cut to the need of specific domains within enterprise development. These domains can be thought of as either technical, like a Web Profile, but can also be functional like e.g. a Telco Profile. The Java EE 6 specification will define a process for specifying profiles and this process will of course focus on keeping everything compatible. The plus side of profiles is that it allows for certain technologies within the profile to independently evolve from the Java EE spec itself. This enables the possibility for technology to evolve much faster than the approximately two years that it takes to produce a new version of the EE platform. The latter being one of the main arguments for rebel frameworks to battle it. The process is too slow. On the other hand, profiles might just fragment the EE world into an infinite number of profiles that nobody can keep track off. So for now I consider it both a promising and a dangerous feature as well.

Another interesting development within the Java EE 6 expert group is the process they call “pruning”. Pruning is like the deprecation mechanism for certain parts of the Java EE platform that are either superseded with new technology, e.g. Entity Beans and JAX-RPC or root out stuff that should have probably never belonged in Java EE anyway. Think JAXR or JSR-88. The pruning process marks these APIs or technologies as optional for the following release. Once they’re optional, application server vendors are free to choose whether they keep on implementing them in the next version of their products.

And of course the ease-of-development trend is being continued. APIs that have no annotation support yet will be extended to do so and furthermore most configuration and packaging requirements will be either loosened or made obsolete. Java EE 6 will include an interesting list of new and updated APIs e.g. JAX-RS (RESTful Web Services), Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, JSF 2.0, JAX-WS 2.2, JAXB 2.1, and many, many more.

In order to unleash the full power of Java EE 6 you’re required to run it with Java SE 6 underneath. Actually, a lot of speakers working for Sun surveyed the crowd to find out who was still developing on Java SE 1.3, 1.4, 5, etc. Most of the time they were surprised with a rather large number of people that were still developing on SE 1.4. They urged everybody to move to Java SE 6, or at least Java SE 5. The problem is of course that the customers that we work for dictate differently :-(

Finally a timeline was presented for when to expect the Java EE 6 stuff:

Q1 2008 – Public review

Q3 2008 – Proposed final draft

Q4 2008 – Reference Implementation (beta) release

Q2 2009 – Final release

So, lots of cool things but a long wait until Q2 2009 :-(

During the remainder of the conference I attended quite some sessions that went in-depth on the APIs involved in Java EE 6. A good example of this was EJB 3.1 by Kenneth Saks who is the spec-lead. Compared to the talk he did at JavaOne not much had changed yet. Mostly details. A public draft can be expected around Q1 2008.

In contrary to the EJB 3.1 talk, the talk by Linda DeMichiel on JPA 2.0 did contain a lot of updates. Much of these consisted of more concrete examples of the advanced modeling stuff that will go into the new JPA. Think Collections, Embeddables of embeddables, collections of embeddables, embeddables having relationships…argh! Dazzling! Great topic for trick questions :-) No, but seriously it’s becoming very advanced complicated stuff.  About time I update my talks on the subject! Also for JPA a rudimentary public draft can be expected somewhere Q1 2008.

At Thursday night, while most conference attendees enjoyed the JavaPolis Movie (BeoWulf) in the THX-certified Metropolis theatre, I attended the JUG Leaders Birds of a Feather session instead. Lots of JUG leaders were present – representing around 30+ JUGS from all over the world including European countries like Belgium, Netherlands (me!), France, Greece, Poland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden but also representatives from a few US JUGS and even a JUG leader from Fortaleze, Brasil. Quite an atmosphere! Besides the JUG leaders the Sun Technology Outreach Office was present and of course the Sun JUG contacts Aaron Houston and Nichole Scott were there. Even Patrick Curran, currently head of the JCP showed up. All of the JUG leaders got the chance to introduce themselves and their JUGS and I hope I did a good job defending the colors of the NLJUG myself. Discussions were lively and were about the legal entity to run a JUG, and how to tackle some of the “problems” that JUGS face worldwide. As I listened to the other JUG leaders I got the impression that we’re definitely doing a great job with the NLJUG ourselves as we managed to overcome most of the things that other JUGS seem to still struggle about.

On the final day of the conference things start winding down a bit. The pavilion floor is now closed and a lot of people are heading home already. Still, there are quite some talks with at least one that makes it into the top three talks of the conference: Scott Ambler on “Evolving Agile”. Scott is a great speaker with lots and lots of real-world experience in his talks. Instead of kicking the light out of non-agiles he this time turned the thing around and put the spotlight on challenges in agile projects. Scott also mentioned “..he joined a little startup called International Business Machines..”, or even better “..I didn’t join them, they actually joined me!”.  Quite a surprise, I wonder where this is going and what his influence will be on the Rational stuff, especially Jazz.

During the remainder of the (short) conference day I attended two more talks. Both were sponsored talks and were not that much spectacular to mention.

So, and with that another year of JavaPolis comes to an end. As I mentioned in this blog before: conferences equal inspiration for me, I think I can easily say that there is much to think about and much to investigate after this year’s edition of JavaPolis. That’s like a bare 5 months before the next big pile of inspiration: JavaOne 2008. Hope to see you there!

Ehrm… ok got to admit it… this blog has been pretty much brain dead over the past few months. But, according to tradition I got to cover at least a few conferences a year and since its JavaPolis time again that is just barely enough of an excuse to bring this blog back to life. So here we go…

As usual a week of JavaPolis kicks off with two days of University. During the day 3 hour sessions offer an in-depth glance at a selection of popular topics. For today I picked a session titled “Open Source ESBs” for the morning session and “Google APIs” as the afternoon pick. Afterwards there were some 30 minutes short sessions that were mainly sponsored sessions.

The Open Source ESBs session was presented by Jos Dirksen and Tijs Rademakers, both familiar to me because we had them to talk at NLJUG events as well. During the talk they covered Mule, Apache ServiceMix and OpenESB. Mule wasn’t entirely new to me. I have been experimenting somewhat with a previous version earlier this year. I had never looked at ServiceMix before. At JavaOne I attended some talks on OpenESB and JBI but since I had done nothing with it afterwards it kind of slipped from my mind. All in all this session was a very interesting teaser to all three solutions.  Both Mule and ServiceMix involve a lot of XML and no (graphical) tooling to help out in defining transformations and mediations. OpenESB on the other hand has a lot of backing from the various NetBeans plug-ins that come with it. My ESB experience besides Mule consists of WebSphere ESB and tools like WebSphere Integration Developer and from what I saw of OpenESB and NetBeans it was quite comparable.

The session was pretty much Spring infested with Mule 2 being Spring based and ServiceMix offering Spring bindings that were used in the various code examples that Jos and Tijs showed. If you happen to know me, or have read earlier installments of this blog it might not be a total surprise that I’m not really a fan of Spring. So in fact I got to admit I was quite relieved when I first saw the JavaPolis schedule and noticed there were hardly any Spring talks on it. Unfortunately, it seems as if Spring has gone underground and pops up in totally unrelated talks. Just to annoy me ;-)

Anyway, besides the Spring nightmare it was actually a very interesting session with just enough information on all three solutions to get the high level picture. On first impression I think I like the Mule approach best. Just a plain EAI solution without all of the fancy and formal stuff around it.

After lunch I attended the Google APIs session. One of the reasons for picking this session was the session abstract that talked about the OpenSocial Container and I’m quite curious about that. Not in the least since I’m still planning on becoming a billionaire by inventing the next piece of fantastic social networking software that everybody wants to use. Unfortunately my dreams were shattered by the fact that *** Wall – who presented the session – mentioned that the abstract was mixing up this talked and the talk on Google Web Toolkit and the OpenSocial Container on Wednesday. Luckily there was enough of other interesting stuff happening at Google to talk about so I decided to stay. What the session did feature were actually two separate API level talks on the Google Collections API and the Google Data APIs. Interesting stuff that tickles your imagination! *** did a typical developer-to-developer kind of talk and did a good job evangelizing these APIs.

Late afternoon was covered by two shorter sessions of 30 minutes each. I picked two with the common theme of Continuous Integration. The first was about Atlassian Bamboo – a product they recently acquired from Cenqua – and the second session was about Hudson. Funny how two tools that share a common theme can be so totally different. A lot of that is perception caused by the presenter. The guy from Atlassian that did the Bamboo presentation was either terribly jet-lagged or lacked presentation skills at all. I admit his way of presenting does not really encourage my feelings about the product. A few weeks back I got an e-mail from Atlassian – since I’m the technical contact for Jira within my company - trying to convince me to take a look at Bamboo. As I had found no time to do so this was my first experience with it. My first impression is that it features some very nice functionality for build telemetry and trend analysis but as usual with Atlassian products it is very much centered on their other products. What I am actually looking for is a more open approach to build information and trend statistics since our Software Factory “Endeavour” uses its own project portal and data warehouse. With Bamboo I’m under the impression that it is possible to get anything IN but getting stuff OUT seems impossible. I think I’m going to stop by their booth anytime this week to ask them a few questions about it. Hudson on the other end does seem to promise a far more open solution since it’s entirely built to be extensible. In fact everything – even the basic functionality of Hudson - is a plug-in. Also the strong Maven integration sounds promising. This is definitely a topic to look into after the conference. To be continued.

Another highlight of the day was the Parleys Newspaper that was handed out to all attendees. It featured an article on the NLJUG and how we are trying to reach out to the student community. The article talked about the project that I ran at the AVANS Hogeschool in the Netherlands where a team of 25 students built us a new administration system.

By the way, I’m not the only one from Info Support attending JavaPolis. I’m accompanied by Paul Kramer – a trainer at our Knowledge Center - and Paul Bakker – who also has his own blog.

In summary this first day was definitely alright and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow. Not in the least since I’m invited to the JavaPolis Speakers and JUG Leaders diner!

 *update* fixed the link to Paul's blog which appeared to be totally different that mine. Thank to my faithful reader Wouter for pointing it out :-)

So this time a combined blog entry for conference days 3 and 4. Right now I’m thinking about explaining why I did that and come up with some lousy excuses for not filing a separate day 3 report, but the truth is that the conference has really taken it’s toll on me and the hangover from last night isn’t really helpful either. We ended up in a place called The Holy Cow…and holy cow, my head is still spinning ;-)

JavaOne day 3 is like the most regular day of the conference. It’s like taking technical session all day long. No real ‘specials’ during the day part. The morning keynote was by Motorola, but I decided to skip that session since I couldn’t take the risk of becoming inspired by the mobility stuff because I simply have no time left on my rainy Sunday afternoons. So you can see it as an act of self protection. For the same reason I have been evading everything Blu-ray related as well. Actually, this isn’t true, but I’m just trying to fool myself here so bear with me. All of that stuff is so incredibly cool that the best and only advice here is to stay far from it ;-)

The technical sessions highlights of the day were: NASA’s World Wind project, interoperable SOA with Java EE and .NET, a business panel on Service Component Architecture and a session on Seam by Gavin King who made a cool one man show out of his presentation. Some stand-up comedy on unit testing as well. Maybe this guy should consider a career change?

The evening part of JavaOne day 3 is special. In fact it is so special they actually have a name for it: AfterDark Bash. And yes, there was heavy bashing involved. The evening featured a round of Comedy Central’s BattleBots. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a must since its robot free fighting ‘till death. And kinda deadly it is, so that’s why they have that huge glass plated cage around the arena, because parts were literary coming off. Those bots are on a killing spree!

After BattleBots there was a smashing performance by the Unauthorized Rolling Stones. They played some classic Stones’ songs and they really rock! So AfterDark Bashing continued in the snake pit in front of the main stage…yeah rite…image a snake pit of nerds with oversized JavaOne backpacks slamming into each other. So you should consider the snake pit imaginary.

For me, day 3 and day 4 sort of collided somewhere and I didn’t really experience a transitioning of days. When I sort of woke up I found myself with some colleagues at Lori’s Diner where I made a futile attempt at having some greasy stuff for breakfast. Then off to the General Session. Friday’s General Session is actually the best part of JavaOne. It’s also known as James Gosling’s Toy Show. The two hour session featured 12 cool demonstrations of innovative ways of using Java technology. There was lots of robotics and funny devices involved. Have you ever thought to see a Java operated meat scale? They probably have the video stream of the session up at the JavaOne web site somewhere soon, so check it out if you’re into the geeky stuff. And oh btw, all of the PDFs from the presentations are now available as well.

The remainder of the day until about 5pm is left for attending technical sessions and trying to stuff in as much knowledge as is still possible. For me highlights were a comparison of Ruby on Rails, Grails, and Java EE 5, and a session on the new validation JSR.

And with that, JavaOne 2007 officially ends, but will probably still last for a while in my head as I’m processing all of the ideas and inspiration that I got during the show. Because that’s what JavaOne is all about: inspiration and endless possibilities! Amen!

I once again have the privilege of attending JavaOne in San Francisco. This morning the official day 1 general session kicked off and with it comes 81 hours of JavaOne. If you’ve been there before, it’s easy to tell what the first 20 minutes of the conference were like. If you’ve never been there, imagine John Gage, head researcher of Sun Microsystems having his yearly rant on meeting people and being a Brazilian. If you happen to be there like 6 times before, like me, then the kick-off tends to be a little annoying. But as soon as those 20 minutes had passed, things got interesting. Very interesting! The keynote was exciting and entertaining. Something it hadn’t been in the past few years. The 2 hour show was designed along some major announcements. It had music, videos and some interesting speakers making it a very entertaining show to watch. The larger part of it contributed to the “Community, community, community” thing and the open sourcing of Java as was to be expected. With a symbolic announcement mail Rich Green, VP of Software, declared the open sourcing of Java and the OpenJDK project to be finalized as of today. I think the main message from this conference is the “Open equals Possibilities” quote. And indeed, open it is. Ranging from cell phones, to Glassfish, to Blu-ray, Java is everywhere and couldn’t be more opened up than it is today.

Then came the major announcement of the show. JavaFX. What is it? I can’t get myself of the idea that it is a total rip-off of what another company tends to call Flex and Flash. That same company, being a serious sponsor of previous JavaOne shows, was nowhere to be seen. Strange? I think not. JavaFX is THE new kid on the block and regarding the amount of spotlight it gets is the new horse Sun bets on. If by now you still have no clue what I’m talking about: think script, think scripting language for RIA, think formerly known as F3 (form follows function). Is it cool? Yes, sort of, but is it new? No, definitely not. Even Microsoft has something like it (Silverlight). This stuff runs on desktops as well as on mobile phones and believe it or not there is even a oval-shaped, completely new designed phone shown that demonstrates its capabilities. Boy, does this image look familiar. Some guy in a black t-shirt announcing a new oval-shaped gadget. Where have I seen this before? So, at the moment I’m still a bit confused about what to think about this stuff. I’m sure this won’t be the last that will be shown of it at this year’s conference, so I have still some days to refine my opinion.

The afternoon technical general session had some more cool things to show. Take a look at NASA’s World Wind, or project IRIS to see what I mean.

The rest of my day was pretty much EJB 3 related. I attended some tips ‘n tricks and best practices session and got a taste of things to come in EJB 3.1. I will be sharing this information in my J-Spring presentation, June 13^th at the J-Spring conference in Bussum, The Netherlands. So stop by if you have the chance.

Yes, it’s coming! I can feel the thrill already. Just a lousy 3 weeks away. About time for my yearly pilgrimage to San Francisco. Now would be the right time for this blog to feature another “why schedule builder 2007 is a horror” story. But this time I decided to put things a different way. I’ve been trying the new schedule builder and was totally surprised they added some new features. Stunning capabilities here folks, like marking of session slots that are already occupied, and it even features export to Outlook capabilities. Unbelievable…it even…oh no…I did it again :-(

Anyway…this year will be my 6th visit to JavaOne. As I’ve already taken a sneak peek at the session catalog, it looks promising once again.

As much as I liked the previous three days of JavaPolis, today was actually a little bit disappointing. For some of the session slots I had a hard time picking one, and most of the sessions I attended today didn't really match up to my expectations.

The keynote was quite a disaster. Marc Fleury from JBoss appeared as some sort of a drag queen presenting some very shallow stuff on professional open source. The second part of the keynote was a very boring and tedious 30 minutes about the RAD Race that took place on Tuesday. Although I'm actually quite interested in what kind of tools were used an stuff like that the organisor of the RAD Race decided to take about 29 minutes and 50 seconds to brag about himself and how challenging the RAD Race is. Actually, it was exactly the same 29 minutes and 50 seconds that he presented last year. Argh! The third and last part of the keynote was a talk by Erich Gamma titled 'Java from the trenches' on the process behind he Eclipse success story. Unfortunatelly for me, it was exactly the same talk as he did at JavaOne, so no new stuff for me there. So reading this stuff you can probably imagine I was actually quite relieved when the keynote was finally over.

On a more positive note though, my JavaPolis day 2 review blog post made it once again into the JavaPolis daily newspaper. Unfortunatelly it's also the final edition of the newspaper, so much for my two minutes of fame. :-)

What really made up for my unlucky pick of sessions today was the amount of former coworkers that I met today. I met some people that I had not seen in quite some years. It appeared as a lot of people just came to JavaPolis for a single day. The pavilion floor but also the sessions were really crowded today.

Possibly the biggest deception of it all was the final talk of the day by Rod Johnson on the Spring Framework 2.0. In the past I've made no secret out of not liking Spring very much. In my opinion it is simply no good. I can't understand why you would even consider using it. The talk by Rod was about everything I needed to confirm my beliefs again. This guy is so arrogant, unbelievable. I think the current plans for Spring 2.0 and beyond outline this as well. It's a world domination story, insulting each and everyone that thinks otherwise.

With the bad taste from the Spring session in my mouth it was time for another highlight, being the JavaPolis movie. Casino Royale was screened in the Metropolis THX theatre and although this blog is not about movie reviewing I found it a very entertaining, must see movie!

So much for day 4 coverage. Tomorrow is the final day and although there is not whole lot of sessions I managed to find some very interesting topics.