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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-).

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.

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.