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.