Introduction to the JCP by Heather VanCura at the Philadelphia JUG

On May 11th the Philadelphia JUG held it's third successful meeting after the leadership changing of the guard. We were very proud to host my former Oracle colleague Heather VanCura who gave an excellent talk introducing the Java Community Process (JCP). All the details for the talk are here. You should note that the Philadelphia JUG is now on meetup.com. This follows in the footsteps of many other JUGs and is a timely transition to a very capable platform. The JUG is now also on Twitter.

Heather's talk was very well received at the JUG. A number of JUG members expressed interest in actively participating in the JCP after the talk. This is certainly something the Philadelphia JUG can effectively facilitate and we will discuss the topic in the leadership board soon. Heather's slides can be downloaded here. Photos from the meeting are here.

It was also very good to see presence from the neighboring Delaware JUG at the meeting. This is the kind of local and regional coordination we are eager to encourage at the Philadelphia JUG. JUG leader Tariq Ali Hook was very impressed by Heather's talk. I offered to give my rendition of the JCP talk at the Delaware JUG. In a similar vein tomorrow I am giving my pragmatic microservices with vanilla Java EE talk remotely on Google Hangout for the Central Pennsylvania JUG. I am grateful to Central Pennsylvania JUG leader Roger Diller for the kind invitation.

After the meeting I took Heather to a Philadelphia cultural institution visited by many global luminaries including the commander-in-chief Barack Obama himself for a very late dinner. If you are a long-time Philly resident you will have no trouble guessing I am talking about Pat's King of Steaks - home of the one and only authentic Philly Cheese Steak.

We hope Heather enjoyed our characteristically down-to-earth but sincere hospitality. It's nothing fancy but it's Philly.

The Philadelphia JUG has a similarly great lineup of talks setup all the way to Fall. Please do stay tuned and help make the JUG all that it can be. We are trying everything we can in the leadership on your behalf to move the JUG onward and upward.

Java EE @ Great Indian Developer Summit 2016

The Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) 2016 was held on April 26-29 in Bangalore, with a follow-on GIDS.Mini held on April 30 in Pune. GIDS is very easily the largest and most significant developer event in Asia. Perhaps reflecting global demographic shifts in software development, GIDS may also now have become one of the largest developer conferences in the world. This was yet another highly successful year for the event. As usual it drew some of the best and brightest minds in Java and beyond. It was truly a privilege to be invited to speak at the event again and I was even more fortunate to have had a number of Java EE sessions there.


I started GIDS on the 28th in the morning with my talk on effectively testing Java EE applications using Arquillian. The talk basically goes through each major Java EE API and demonstrates through code how the API could be tested using Arquillian. The slides for the talk is posted below:

Testing Java EE Applications Using Arquillian from Reza Rahman

The code for the talk is available on GitHub. If you are looking into testing Java EE applications using Arquillian, the code should be very helpful to you. Feel free to give me a holler if you need any help. The talk went well and had some excellent Q & A.

In the late afternoon I delivered one my most recent talks titled "Down-to-Earth Microservices with Java EE". The talk has two aims. The first is to try to do the right thing in explaining what microservices really are, what practical value they offer for most of us and when you should consider them (or not). The second aim is to demonstrate why Java EE makes perfect natural sense for developing sensible real world microservices, so called "monoliths" and everything in between. I also briefly explore the work that some parts of the Java EE community is doing to support what I lovingly call "microservices Nirvana" (spoiler: I don't think most of us can or need to achieve this Nirvana state). The slide deck for this talk is below (click here if you can't see the embedded slide deck):

Down-to-Earth Microservices with Java EE from Reza Rahman

Despite being later in the day the talk was very well attended. It is clearly popular, on the mark and well received. There was good Q & A during the talk and some very nice feedback afterwards. I presented this same talk along with Steve Millidge (C2B2, Payara co-founder) at JavaOne. You can view the JavaOne recording of the talk here. Concurrent to my talk Sebastien Blanc of Red Hat delivered a talk on Forge + Java EE 7 while Ivar Grimstad delivered a talk on the MVC 1.0 API slated for Java EE 8.

In the next time slot I delivered my latest talk on HTTP/2 and Servlet 4 titled "HTTP/2 and What it Means for the Java EE Ecosystem". The talk goes through the very important changes in HTTP/2 and how these changes need to be adopted by various Java EE 8 APIs like Servlet 4 and JSF 2.3. Towards the end of the talk I discussed the very worrisome lack of progress by Oracle-led Java EE 8 JSRs including the foundational Servlet 4 JSR. I also mentioned the very important Java EE Guardian initiative I have become a part of after leaving Oracle. While the initiative is not fully public yet, it has already received a fair bit of press coverage. After the initiative becomes fully public I plan to write about it here. It is an initiative every Java developer should wholeheartedly support if they care about the longevity of server-side Java. The slide deck for the talk is below (click here if you can't see the embedded slide deck):

HTTP/2 and What it Means for the Java EE Ecosystem from Reza Rahman

The next day in the afternoon I delivered my talk titled "Using NoSQL with JPA, CDI and Java EE". The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here:

Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman

The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running.

At GIDS.Mini I repeated my talks on Java EE microservices and testing Java EE using Arquillian.

The conference aside, from the moment my plane landed to the moment it took off India proved the land of warmhearted, kind, hospitable people yet again. I don't mean just the good folks in the Java community but literally every one of the many people I encountered in India. Indians may still have many things that they must do without but Indians are not short of pride, hope, civility and hospitality. All in all my trip to India was a thorough pleasure and I look forward to going back again soon.