Sebastian Meyen, the chair of worldwide JAX Conference kick started JAX London 2011 with a very passionate opening session highlighting that JAX is all about Java, that they are comitted to Java, and not going to dilute the content. This is the 10th year of JAX conferences. Even though originally the word JAX was coined as an acronym for "Java Apache XML" indicating the open source nature and everything XML around Java but now its more popularly known as JAX.
The successful recipe for the JAX conference is "passion for the Java platform & ecosystem" and "a pramatic mix with development, architecture, agile, and other concepts around Java". In Sebastien’s words "Java is a huge stake, heavily growing, innovating and worth focusing on it" and is a "rich environment for innovation". The JAX Innovation Awards giving $10,000 for the most innovative contributions to Java further proves their commitment to Java. Do you have the most innovative Java technology, most innovative Java company, and the top Java ambassador to recommend ? Submit now!
The first keynote of the day was by Dan North on the "Patterns of Effective Delivery". He highlighted several design patterns and the key ones were:
- Spike and Stabilise – "Spike" is the non-TDD code written during the development cycle and then TDD applied to stabilise it for production.
- Ginger Cake – About me legitimizing copy/paste, look for abstractions afterwards. Start WET and then DRY it.
- Create Urgency – Create lots of instances where you are surprised, optimize for deliberate learning than for deliberate practice. Create an urgency for yourself for technologies that are genuinely useful. Difficult to change your thinking consciously, need a crisis.
- Socratic Testing – Using the process of automated tests to draw out knowledge about the code.
- Fits In My Head – Keeping the design small enough such that the entire design fits in your head, then you can reason the whole thing.
Being the chair of Java EE track, I spent most of my day attending the sessions there. The first session by Ales Justin explained how to run a Java EE application on Google App Engine. His slides are available below:
Ales explained his experience of building a sample application using JPA2, JSF2, Bean Validation, delpoing on GAE. The slides very well capture the restrictions of the platform and how he worked around them. The GAE API was even abstracted such that a pure Java EE application can be written and thus be portable across multiple application servers.
David Blevins’s session on Fun with EJB 3.1 and Open EJB was indeed a lot of fun. He provided a good history of how the EJB and OpenEJB have evolved over years. There were lots of code samples highlighting the ease-of-use improvements done in EJB 3.1such as @Stateless, @Schedule, @Asynchronous, @Singleton, Embeddable EJB API and many others. I particularly loved his statement:
People who complain about EJB are stuck in 2005 and believe ignorance is my pride. Its testable, light, and pretty great!
Seriously, if you complain about EJB being heavy, non-functional, incomplete, the following code fragment is all it takes to create an EJB:
@Stateless
public class MyEJB {
public String myMethod(...) { }
}
and that too packaged in a WAR file, no deployment descriptors or any special packaging. Do you still think its heavy weight ? Think again!
David’s slides are available below:
Doug Clarke talked about "Java Persistence API 2.0 with EclipseLink", Joseph Shum talked about "Integrating Enterprise Applications into Liferay Portal", and then Dan Allen talked about "Using CDI Extensions to make a better Java EE". Dan showed several examples of how CDI extensions can be authored easily to extend capabilites of the existing platform. Their slides will be available on jaxlondon.com.
And I also gave two presentations:
- GlassFish 3.1 – Simplifying your Java EE 6 Development and Deployment
- OSGi-enabled Java EE Applications using GlassFish (in the OSGi track)
The first talk explained how several features in GlassFish 3.1 such as:
- Deploy-on-Save (in NetBeans and Eclipse)
- Active Redeploy (preserve sessions across re-deploys at CLI or NetBeans and Eclipse)
- 29% better startup/deploy/redeploy cycle
- Application runner (java -jar glassfish.jar foo.war)
- Maven integration (mvn gf:run, gf:start, gf:deploy, etc)
- Embedded GlassFish
and many other features make GlassFish an extremely productive development environment for your Java EE 6 applications. And then features like:
- High Availability, Clustering
- Centralized Administration
- Application-scoped Resources
- Application Versioning
- 33% better High Availability performance
- Better scalability – upto 100 instances per domain
- RESTful monitoring and management
make it an equally compelling deployment platform. The slides with all the details are available below:
Where are you deploying your Java EE 6 applications ?
The second talk explained the why/how of OSGi-enabled Java EE applicatins. The slides are available below:
The first few slides are OSGi introductory so jump ahead to slide #22 for all the interesting stuff. The screencast #38 showcase how to build an OSGi-enabled Java EE Applications using Eclipse and GlassFish and comes with the complete and detailed instructions. The screencast #32 shows the same using NetBeans.
The day ended with a 1.5 hrs interactive Java EE 6 hackathon and more details on that in a later blog.
Here are some pictures captured from the London visit:
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And the complete album is available:
Technorati: conf jaxlondon javaee6 osgi glassfish cdi gae google ejb openejb liferay
