JavaOne 2010 Round-Up

Overall, JavaOne 2010 was great personally.

The first session I did was the Resin 4 Java EE 6 Web Profile talk titled “Resin: A Light-footed Java EE 6 Web Profile Platform”. This was the first time Emil and I co-presented and I thought it went very well. The attendance was moderate but we had a number of good questions and a handful of folks asked for the slides/demo code afterwards. That same evening I did a CDI BOF with Dan Allen of Red Hat/JBoss and David Blevins of Apache OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB. The BOF was titled “Implementing CDI: Goals, Milestones, and Perspectives” and was well-attended. We had lively discussion around the current state of implementations, the CDI ecosystem as well as the future of CDI/Java EE.

My first talk for the second day of the conference was the Java EE testing talk with Debu titled “Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques”. It was a full house and the talk went very well although we ran out of time and could not demo JAX-WS/JAX-RS testing. The talk covered end-to-end testing along the entire Java EE stack including Servlet 3, JSF 2, EJB 3.1, JPA 2, JAX-WS and JAX-RS using existing and emerging tools like JUnit, HttpUnit, HtmlUnit, Cactus, Selenium, JSFUnit, embedded containers, embedded databases, Arquillian/ShrinkWrap, Resin JUnit integration support and soapUI. We got excellent feedback for the talk. It was only somewhat surprising that folks don’t realize how robust Java EE testing is with the latest release and tools like Arquillian. In the evening I did an EJB 3.1 BOF with Linda Demichael of Sun/Oracle, Mike Keith of Sun/Oracle, David Blevins of Apache OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB as well as Andy Rubinger of JBoss/Red Hat titled “Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) Community Discussion”. The attendance was moderate but the discussion was very lively.

The last session I did for the conference was on Wednesday. It was a panel with Adam Bien, Emmanuel Bernard of JBoss/Red Hat, Krasimir Semerdzhiev of SAP, Roberto Chinnici of Sun/Oracle, David Blevins of OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB and Jim Knutson of IBM titled “Java EE 6 Panel: What Do We Do Now?”. The panel was moderated by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine of Sun/Oracle. He blogged about the panel here. It was a full-house and we had very lively discussion.

I of course met up with the usual suspects from JBoss, SpringSource, Apache, Sun/Oracle, etc throughout the conference. I have some serious mixed feelings about the conference itself. The programming and organization was great but I could not help but feel that JavaOne was demoted. I think a lot of developers have this same sentiment and I hope Sun/Oracle will do better next time.

I got a chance to go out to a climbing gym with my friends in the Resin team. It was pretty cool considering I haven't done any serious rock climbing for a good few years although Nicole and I did go up Mount Saint Helen's the year before the last. I also went out to a folk rock gig one night with my friends from the Resin team - it wasn't too bad at all. I did get a chance to catch a couple of metal gigs at Slim's and Kimo's the other evenings. The gig at Slim's was particularly cool with relatively young guys in their twenties doing their own rendition of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Iron Maiden and AC/DC. They did a great job and it was great to see "classic" metal alive and well, even if it is in the bubble that San Francisco can be.

Java EE 6 Testing Talk at Harrisburg JUG

On September 16th, I did the Java EE 6 end-to-end testing talk at the Harrisburg JUG. The talk covered doing testing across the Java EE 6 API tiers using Unit, HttpUnit, HtmlUnit, Cactus, Selenium, JSFUnit, Arquillian/ShrinkWrap, Resin, soapUI, etc. It is the same talk I am doing at JavaOne 2010 so it is great preparation!

It was great to be back to the JUG again and seeing some familiar friendly faces (and some new ones) despite rotten weather on the day.

CDI Talk at San Diego and Silicon Valley Java User Groups

En-route to the Resin marketing/engineering meetings in San Diego/San Francisco, I did my CDI quick tour talk at the San Diego JUG on July 20th and Silicon Valley JUG on July 21st (the same talk I did for TSSJS 2010).

Both talks went very well. The San Diego JUG was relatively small but very lively. I got great feedback on the talk afterwards. The Silicon Valley JUG hosted at Google was larger but understandably a bit more sedate. I did get some very good questions though and some great feedback.

I look forward to speaking at both JUGs in the near future again.