Here's a list of the sessions I attended on day three:
TS-4436 - Technical Overview of GlassFish v2
Dhiru Pandey, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Larry White, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
This session really just covered the new clustering and high available features that are new in Glassfish version 2. The Glassfish team have take the approach of creating a cluster admin node which is used to manage the the cluster topology. I really not a fan of the this approach I like the idea on a completely homogenous environment. Currently the state replication is only done basically to the next node in the cluster rather than all nodes with the last node replicating to the first node. This is different to the default clustering in JBoss where it replicates to all nodes. Now if the case of a failure a client will be re-directed to any node in the cluster and will then request the transfer of state to this node. This is quite an expensive operation but I guess it occurs once during at failure. I think until these clustering feautres have been bedded down I would still find it hard to recommend using Glassfish in any real production environments but I must admit the gap to other apps servers in closing. I think that if you want to build portable JEE apps and you are developing on other apps servers you should as part of your testing deploy your app to Glassfish.
TS-4092 - Seam and SOA
Gavin King, JBoss
This session wasn't a Seam and SOA talk as Gavin hasn't finished the work in Seam in this area. I was a talk about build Seam app in eclipse using Seam Gen and some of the new hot-deployment features such as being able to modify JSF pages in eclipse save them as simply refresh the browser to see the change. Will not actually that big a deal we had this with JSPs. What as very cool was the ability to modify Seam components (Java Classes) in eclipse save them and they would be automatically re-deployed in the background. So I can change my Java code save it and hit the refresh button on the browser to see the change. This is very cool and can really turn Java productivity on it's head. Currently there is one exception is that you can't change entities. To get this to work some changes will need to be made in the Hibernate core to support this. This may or may not happen but in reality how often do you change your data model.
TS-9861 - Advanced Java Programming Language Refactoring: Pushing the Envelope
Tom Ball, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
This session was really just show some on the new refactoring tools that are available in NetBeans 6 but this did discuss some of the issues when refactoring code from Java 1.4 to Java 5. The new NetBeans editor is pretty good but is still really unstable and crashes every few minutes well at least for me :)
TS-6957 - Project Phobos: Server-Side Scripting for the Java Platform
Ludovic Champenois, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Roberto Chinnici, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
<Rant-On>
Now here's an hour of my life I will never get back. Mixing both client, server and html code on the same page all written in a extremely weak programming language like JavaScript just seems plan wrong. I tried to keep an open mind going into this session but it really just reaffirmed my view point. The big selling point is that developers who are familiar in writing client side JavaScirpt can transition to server development. Frankly I wouldn't want half of the web-developers who working solely in JavaScript going anywhere near the server side.
</Rant-Off>
TS-4532 - Building an Embeddable Enterprise Content Management Core with the Latest Java Technologies
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo; Arnaud Lefevre, Nuxeo
This session outline the architecture of the Nuxeo ECM system which is an ECM built using open source technologies. In fact Nuxeo is put together using a pretty impressive stack of technologies such as JEE5, OSGi, Seam, Eclipse RCP plus more (See http://nuxeo.org for details). By default it's deployed on top of JBoss AS but in the future it will support other app servers plus standalone. What I like most is that is that Nuxeo is very flexible and has componentised design so I can see it being very easy to embed the Nuxeo core into other applications that might require some sort of content management. This project is definitely one to watch and even get involved with.
BOF-1575 - AB5k: An Advanced Open-Source Java Technology-Based Widget Container
Joshua Marinacci, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Robert Cooper , Self-employed
I met both Joshua and Robert at the JavaPosse BOF on Tuesday. Joshua is a bit of a regular on the JavaPosse podcast. This is where I had heard about AB5k (Awesome box 5000). So I thought I would come and check it out. AB5k is a desktop widget system (think Mac Dashboard, Yahoo widgets etc) written in Java which also got a new name Glossitope (http://glossitope.org). It still really a work in progress but seems to work pretty well but big plus is that you can write widgets in Java using the full Java API including Java2D and 3D with jogl. The long term plan is to be able to host widgets from other widget systems like Yahoo. A big reason to great yet another widget system is that currently on Linux there is no real support for a really good widget system and since Glossitope is Java it could quickly become the de-facto standard for Linux. I must admit if I was going to write a widget I would much prefer to use a language like Java rather than some hybird of javascript, css and html. I like going to sessions like this one, it feels like dessert. Man I must be sick.....:)
Sun After Dark Party
This is the official JavaOne party and was actually pretty good fun. They heaps on things that would appeal to all us geeks like free junk food, video games and well only 2 free beers but hey it's a start. They also had a Battle Bot arena setup (http://www.battlebots.com/) which is very similar to Robot Wars which was the format I'm familiar with. So it was pretty cool to see two remote controlled bots smash the crap out of each other live. Also they had a couple of bands play but the highlight was "Grinder Girl" (As seen on the David Letterman show) now I had seen something similar to this before but I think pretty much the other 600 hundred people or so hadn't. So how do I explain "Grinder Girl" hmmm just see pic below to get an idea :)
after the party I went to the AB5k BOF and then to the pub with a bunch of guys from the BOF.
- TS-4436 - Technical Overview of GlassFish v2
- TS-4092 - Seam and SOA
- TS-9861 - Advanced Java Programming Language Refactoring: Pushing the Envelope
- TS-6957 - Project Phobos: Server-Side Scripting for the Java Platform
- TS-4532 - Building an Embeddable Enterprise Content Management Core with the Latest Java Technologies
- BOF-1575 - AB5k: An Advanced Open-Source Java Technology-Based Widget Container
TS-4436 - Technical Overview of GlassFish v2
Dhiru Pandey, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Larry White, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
This session really just covered the new clustering and high available features that are new in Glassfish version 2. The Glassfish team have take the approach of creating a cluster admin node which is used to manage the the cluster topology. I really not a fan of the this approach I like the idea on a completely homogenous environment. Currently the state replication is only done basically to the next node in the cluster rather than all nodes with the last node replicating to the first node. This is different to the default clustering in JBoss where it replicates to all nodes. Now if the case of a failure a client will be re-directed to any node in the cluster and will then request the transfer of state to this node. This is quite an expensive operation but I guess it occurs once during at failure. I think until these clustering feautres have been bedded down I would still find it hard to recommend using Glassfish in any real production environments but I must admit the gap to other apps servers in closing. I think that if you want to build portable JEE apps and you are developing on other apps servers you should as part of your testing deploy your app to Glassfish.
TS-4092 - Seam and SOA
Gavin King, JBoss
This session wasn't a Seam and SOA talk as Gavin hasn't finished the work in Seam in this area. I was a talk about build Seam app in eclipse using Seam Gen and some of the new hot-deployment features such as being able to modify JSF pages in eclipse save them as simply refresh the browser to see the change. Will not actually that big a deal we had this with JSPs. What as very cool was the ability to modify Seam components (Java Classes) in eclipse save them and they would be automatically re-deployed in the background. So I can change my Java code save it and hit the refresh button on the browser to see the change. This is very cool and can really turn Java productivity on it's head. Currently there is one exception is that you can't change entities. To get this to work some changes will need to be made in the Hibernate core to support this. This may or may not happen but in reality how often do you change your data model.
TS-9861 - Advanced Java Programming Language Refactoring: Pushing the Envelope
Tom Ball, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
This session was really just show some on the new refactoring tools that are available in NetBeans 6 but this did discuss some of the issues when refactoring code from Java 1.4 to Java 5. The new NetBeans editor is pretty good but is still really unstable and crashes every few minutes well at least for me :)
TS-6957 - Project Phobos: Server-Side Scripting for the Java Platform
Ludovic Champenois, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Roberto Chinnici, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
<Rant-On>
Now here's an hour of my life I will never get back. Mixing both client, server and html code on the same page all written in a extremely weak programming language like JavaScript just seems plan wrong. I tried to keep an open mind going into this session but it really just reaffirmed my view point. The big selling point is that developers who are familiar in writing client side JavaScirpt can transition to server development. Frankly I wouldn't want half of the web-developers who working solely in JavaScript going anywhere near the server side.
</Rant-Off>
TS-4532 - Building an Embeddable Enterprise Content Management Core with the Latest Java Technologies
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo; Arnaud Lefevre, Nuxeo
This session outline the architecture of the Nuxeo ECM system which is an ECM built using open source technologies. In fact Nuxeo is put together using a pretty impressive stack of technologies such as JEE5, OSGi, Seam, Eclipse RCP plus more (See http://nuxeo.org for details). By default it's deployed on top of JBoss AS but in the future it will support other app servers plus standalone. What I like most is that is that Nuxeo is very flexible and has componentised design so I can see it being very easy to embed the Nuxeo core into other applications that might require some sort of content management. This project is definitely one to watch and even get involved with.
BOF-1575 - AB5k: An Advanced Open-Source Java Technology-Based Widget Container
Joshua Marinacci, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Robert Cooper , Self-employed
I met both Joshua and Robert at the JavaPosse BOF on Tuesday. Joshua is a bit of a regular on the JavaPosse podcast. This is where I had heard about AB5k (Awesome box 5000). So I thought I would come and check it out. AB5k is a desktop widget system (think Mac Dashboard, Yahoo widgets etc) written in Java which also got a new name Glossitope (http://glossitope.org). It still really a work in progress but seems to work pretty well but big plus is that you can write widgets in Java using the full Java API including Java2D and 3D with jogl. The long term plan is to be able to host widgets from other widget systems like Yahoo. A big reason to great yet another widget system is that currently on Linux there is no real support for a really good widget system and since Glossitope is Java it could quickly become the de-facto standard for Linux. I must admit if I was going to write a widget I would much prefer to use a language like Java rather than some hybird of javascript, css and html. I like going to sessions like this one, it feels like dessert. Man I must be sick.....:)
Sun After Dark Party
This is the official JavaOne party and was actually pretty good fun. They heaps on things that would appeal to all us geeks like free junk food, video games and well only 2 free beers but hey it's a start. They also had a Battle Bot arena setup (http://www.battlebots.com/) which is very similar to Robot Wars which was the format I'm familiar with. So it was pretty cool to see two remote controlled bots smash the crap out of each other live. Also they had a couple of bands play but the highlight was "Grinder Girl" (As seen on the David Letterman show) now I had seen something similar to this before but I think pretty much the other 600 hundred people or so hadn't. So how do I explain "Grinder Girl" hmmm just see pic below to get an idea :)
after the party I went to the AB5k BOF and then to the pub with a bunch of guys from the BOF.