EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate Comparison at NoVAJUG

On the 15th of this month, I presented my popular EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate comparison talk at the Northern Virginia Java User Group (NoVAJUG). This bunch was by far the most lively I have ever seen. I always thought of the DC area to be filled with sedate government employee types. Nothing could be farther from the truth!

There were a number of people in the crowd who have used both EJB 2.x and Spring+Hibernate in a production environment and have explored EJB 3 (the room was filled to capacity). To be truthful, it felt a little bit like preaching to the choir, and I picked up a number of pretty good ideas from the crowd.

Folks pointed out the EJB 3 deployment, performance tuning, clustering and administration support for Java EE application servers like WebLogic 10. Someone suggested a performance benchmark for both the stacks. I thought that was an excellent idea. I'll talk it over with Debu and see what he thinks...I know Oracle produced a benchmark comparing EJB 3 and EJB 2.x. I wonder if they could produce one for Spring+Hibernate and the Oracle AS EJB 3 container + TopLink JPA provider? It would be a very intriguing experiment indeed...

Real World Java Seminar at NYC Roosevelt Hotel

I spoke at the Real World Java Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC on the 13th of this month. I gave my popular EJB 3/Spring/Hibernate comparison talk to a full-house audience. I think SYS-CON (the publishers of the widely read Java Developers Journal) had the right idea hosting this seminar. The one-day seminar was well-attended, even in the slow month of August. Given the number of Java developers on the East Coast there really is a lot of room for a large JavaOne style event. I know the travel expenses are a big deterrent for many people to go to JavaOne.

To some degree, the regional No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) symposiums kind of bridge that gap, but something like Real World Java can be a great success. I hope SYS-CON repeats the event in the coming years. I would certainly be delighted to speak there again.

Besides giving the talk, I got to speak with a number of Java folks like Jeremy Geelan (VP of SYS-CON), Reema Patel (Sun Evangelist), Mark Pollack (one of the Interface21 guys involved in Spring.NET) and Mark Richards (senior architect at IBM). I got positive feedback from a bunch of EJB 3 in Action readers too!

JPA+Hibernate 3 Tutorial at NYC JUG

On the 2nd of this month I gave a very hands on tutorial to JPA using Hibernate 3 at the NYC JUG. It went surprisingly smooth and actually turned out to be very interactive for a lab format talk. I can't wait to see how things turn out when I repeat the talk in Connecticut next month.

I have to say this was one of the most charming groups I've talked at. The room in the New Yorker hotel was cramped as is everything in NYC, packed full of very young, very bright people from all over the World. It really felt like an intense environment where only "hardboiled" coders roam...

I was delighted to find out the JUG leader Dario is conducting a well-attended training course on EJB 3. I look forward to talking there again and maybe collaborating with Dario on a joint project sometime in the near future.