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!