EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate Comparison Talk at Princeton JUG

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

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.