Speaking at JavaOne 2009

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.

Speaking at TheServerSide Java Symposeum

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.

Spring JPA Support Talk at the Charleston JUG

On February 26th, I went back to the Charleston, SC JUG to fill in for a speaker that dropped out at the last minute. JUG leader Jason McDonald requested that I talk about Spring's support for JPA (material we cover in the last chapter of EJB 3 in Action - "EJB 3 and Spring"; the talk updates the content to cover Spring 2.5). The code for the very hands-on presentation should be posted on the JUG's website soon.

Jason let me know that the JUG needs more people involved in a leadership role since he is really being strained to manage the JUG on top of his already hectic schedule. If you live near the Charleston area, please consider getting in touch with Jason. The Charleston JUG is actually very well funded and organized thanks to Jason's efforts and can fully sponsor speakers from across the country. It also has a great host in BenefitFocus (a major tech vendor for one of my Philadelphia based clients). Given the small number of JUGs in the South, it would be a shame to not see this one reach its full potential. I certainly enjoyed speaking there and would go back there again.

I also encourage you to become a member of the JUG and help it grow if you are a local Java developer. JUGs are a great vehicle for developing grassroots Java communities, not to mention for keeping up-to-date in a fast-paced industry and for developing life-long friendships with fellow developers.

JPA/Database Tuning Talk at the Harrisburg JUG

On February 19th, I did one of my most favorite talks at the Harrisburg JUG. Titled "Keeping a Relational Perspective for Optimizing JPA", the talk is about some of the database centric performance tuning techniques I've utilized for JPA (and the persistence tier in general) over the years. I am very glad I finally found a JUG interested in this relatively advanced talk!

As usual, the Harrisburg crowd was great and I'm proud to say I once worked in the central PA area. Indeed, it seems to be one of the few areas in PA that seems to be enjoying vibrant economic growth, despite national trends recently.

Java EE 6 Preview at the NYC JUG

On January 26th, I went back to the NYC JUG to give a preview of Java EE 6. Despite the unmistakable market crash in the NYC area, turnout was very good and folks seemed relatively upbeat.

I went out for Dinner with JUG leader Dario and some of the other JUG members after the talk. The NYC JUG is always a pleasure because of the quality and dynamism of the crowd. I look forward to going back there soon after I get some of the things that have been on my plate done (like updating the EJB 3 in Action code samples for JBoss 5 and GlassFish v2 as well as writing IDE setup instructions for Eclipse/NetBeans that a lot of readers have been asking us for).

Java EE 6 Preview at the NoVA JUG

I did my Java EE 6 preview talk at the NoVA JUG on January 8th. It was really great to see that the JUG has grown significantly since I spoke there last. The feedback from this crucial metropolitan area was great and the talk was very interactive.

My good friend Dan Allen, the author of Seam in Action showed up for the meeting and did a great job explaining some of the JSR 299 (aka WebBeans, aka Java Contexts and Dependency Injection) functionality. I was a little sad to hear that he has abandoned the independent consulting path in favor of joining the JBoss team. He is now very active with JSR 299 and appears to be getting ready to write JCDI in Action via Manning. I wish him the best of the luck on the book. I think he did a great job on Seam in Action.