Miles to go …

Oracle was a gold sponsor of Dallas Tech Fest 2010 – 9 parallel tracks and 5 sessions/track.

I gave a 3-hour hands-on workshop on Java EE 6, GlassFish, and NetBeans. The room was packed during the first part (about 60 or so) and most of the audience retained for second part. The workshop explained several advantages of Java EE 6 such as simplicity, ease-of-use, and richness of the platform. These concepts were demonstrated using multiple coding sessions involving several technologies from the platform. Specifically it showed:

• Creating simple Java EE 6 application using JSP, Servlets 3.0, Enterprise Java Beans 3.1
• Facelets-based page creation using Java Server Faces 2
• Contexts & Dependency Injection with Java Server Faces 2
• Accessing database table using Java Persistence API 2
• RESTful Web services using JAX-RS

NetBeans IDE specific features like Deploy-on-Save and Session-Preservation features that boosts your development productivity were also demonstrated using code samples.

The slides are now available:

Watch Tim Rayburn (one of the conference organizers) talks about where Dallas Tech Fest is today and how they like to evolve it for next year:

One of the attendees mentioned after the workshop that it was like "drinking from the fire hose". The content could be overwhelming for users who are not familiar with NetBeans and new to Java EE 6. As repeated multiple times during the workshop, all the code shown in the workshop is clearly explained in screencast #30 (also in-lined below).

Feel free to re-run the workshop at your own pace and convenience. And you can always post any comment on this blog or GlassFish forum for question and/or clarifications.

Check out some pictures from the event:

On a personal front, met a few avid readers of my blog, connected with some Oracle folks, and barely met Ted Neward. I found Texas very humid and hot early in the morning for me. But still managed to squeeze in a 10K run, at a much slower pace:

One of the advantage of staying at Westin hotels is that they have a running map close to their hotel. And if not then their "Westin Workout" gyms are typically well equipped – even a stepper and exercise ball And a complimentary upgrade to United First both ways on both the legs certainly added to the overall great experience.

Thanks Erik & Tim for providing me the opportunity to speak, I definitely look forward to participating next year!

And here is the complete photo album below:

Technorati: conf dallastechfest dallas glassfish javaee6 netbeans

I ran San Francisco 1/2 marathon over the weekend and improved my timing from last year by 3 minutes. I guess dance at a pre-wedding ceremony and 4 hours of sleep the night before slowed me down otherwise could’ve pushed harder. Anyway the results are still encouraging and the bar is higher for the next time!

This makes me among top 1.2 % runners overall, top 2.5% for "Men", and top 2.3% in "M 30-39" category. Here is the overall leader board:

I’m about 20 minutes behind the winner (5:47 pace) and so need to push really hard to close the gap there. Who knows I may win one day, but for now the plan is to close the gap as much as possible. Seems really difficult, but not impossible!

And I almost made it to the women’s leader board

Michael Wardian, a popular American marathoner and ultramarathoner came second in the full marathon. It was a pleasure to see him cruising back on the Golden Gate birdge.

Here are the mile splits:

One thing clearly evident from the splits is that any amount of hill training is less. This is all the more evident by looking at speed / elevation chart:

Click on the image to replay the race.

And finally here is race route:

Here is the cumulative result of all the marathons so far:

Marathon / Half Marathon	Total Time	Pace
San Francisco 1/2 Marathon 2010	1:35:42	7:18
San Jose Rock-n-Roll 2009	1:30:59	6:57
San Francicsco 1/2 Marathon 2009	1:38:21	7:31
Kaiser Permanente San Francicsco 1/2 2009	1:41:30	7:45
Silicon Valley 1/2 2008	1:45:42	8:04
San Francisco 1/2 2008	1:52:44	8:25
San Francisco Full 2007	4:04:33	9:20
Silicon Valley Full 2006	4:06:57	9:25
San Francisco 1/2 2005	1:48:50	8:18

Technorati: running marathon results runsfm sanfrancisco

Jigsaw puzzle, modular, standard, integrated specifications, simple, annotation-driven, standards compliance, vendor independence, and light-weight deployment are some of the benefits highlighted by the Java EE 6 community.

In the Java EE 6 Feedback from Community series you can learn about how Java EE 6 is currently being used in production, development and deployment environments used within the community, and even feature requests for Java EE 7.

This entry comes from Johan Vos who started to work with Java in 1995. He worked on the Java Linux port with the Blackdown team. He has been doing Java consulting and development for a number of customers in completely different areas. Over the years, he has been active in a number of Java-based community projects, e.g. OSGi, the Glassfish project and JFXtras.org. With LodgON, the company he co-founded, he is mainly working on Java solutions for social networking software. Since he can’t make a choice between embedded development and enterprise development, his main focus is on end-to-end Java, combining the strengths of back-end systems and embedded devices. His favorite technologies are currently Java EE / Glassfish at the backend and JavaFX at the frond-end.

Here is a short summary of Java EE 6 from him:

Developers can concentrate on business logic, Java EE 6 is providing a standard for the infrastructure

Read on for other fun stuff …

1. How are you using Java EE 6 today ? What limits your adoption ?

I’m using Java EE 6 in most of the Enterprise projects I’m doing. This is not a requirement, but it turns out that when talking to people about what they really want, the Java EE 6 platform provides lots of the components that are needed to create an end-to-end solution.

Java EE 6 has evolved since the announcement of J2EE. It became more usable, and easier to develop and configure. In the past, a large number of non-standard libraries and frameworks have been developed since J2EE was too complex for most simple problems. The Java EE expert group clearly has learned from these evolutions, and the current Java EE 6 spec provides the functionality that is available in those frameworks, but as a standard. This is a huge benefit.

2. What Java EE 6 technologies are you using and why ?

I often use JPA. In earlier versions of the Java Enterprise standard, it was very hard to use the persistence layer in order to connect to a database. It was often easier to write your own connection pooling system, and perform SQL queries. But with JPA 2.0, it became much easier to manage the persistence.

I’m using (stateless) Session Beans as well, including the new Singleton Bean, combined with the @Startup annotation. The latter makes it much easier to perform tasks that need to be done only once.

I’m also using JAX-RS and Jersey frequently. In particular, I use Jersey for the communication with clients based on XML. The Transaction API is also something that I often use, either explicitly or implicitly.

3. What is your development and deployment environment ?

I’m mainly using NetBeans 6.9 on Linux. I download the full version of NetBeans, since I need both Java EE as well as JavaFX. NetBeans 6.9 comes pre-installed with Glassfish 3.0.1, so there is no need to download a whole application server to start Java EE 6 development.

4. What previous versions of Java EE / J2EE have you used ? How has the migration to Java EE 6 benefited ?

I’ve been working with Java EE since version J2EE 1.2. I have always avoided to migrate projects from older to newer versions, but I always start new projects on the latest released version. Early version of J2EE required more implementation-specific XML configuration (remember the sun-cmp-mappings.xml), and once you’ve done this you don’t want to change this. Once projects are in deployment, you cannot easily change the runtime procedures.

Operations are often carried out by a different group than the development team. New versions of the J2EE/Java EE standard require changes in development but also in operations.

One of the benefits of Java EE 6, however, is that it also simplify the packaging and deployment procedures. Using annotations in JAX-RS and Servlets, for example, eliminates the need of XML-based configuration files. And often these configuration files make the handover from development to production deployment difficult. Clearly, the TCO for an average Enterprise project can be much lower when using Java EE6.

5. Describe the benefits of Java EE 6 to you in 120 characters.

Developers can concentrate on business logic, JavaEE6 is providing a standard for the infrastructure.

6. Advice for anybody who is looking at Java EE 6 for their next project ?

Use what you need. Nothing less, and nothing more. Although much easier than 10 years ago, Java Enterprise development can be complex. There are 2 situations you have to avoid:

1. Sometimes, developers don’t know about the infrastructure already provided by the Java EE platform, and they are duplicating functionality in their own code. If you look at the JPA and the JTA for example, that provides functionality that is needed in most projects.
2. In a number of other cases, I see developers using features that are available in the appserver, but that are not needed in their application. The Java EE 6 spec is a composition of a number of specifications, and you don’t have to use all the sub-specs.
   

7.  What new features you’d like to see in Java EE 7 ?

Java EE 6 brought simplicity in complex enterprise applications, and made a significant move towards web-based projects. Indeed, the Java EE 6 specification is rather focused on the Web. While there are many usecases and real-world scenarios that have the Web as the most important client, I think there should be more attention for other clients, i.e. PDA, mobile phone, TV, JavaCard. Easy integration capabilities between those low-resource devices and high-end backend system will drive the adoption of Java EE.

From another point of view, more integration with the environment would be useful. For example, in a number of cases I would like to execute a specific EJB-call once CPU load is below 50%, or once disk usage is too high. I understand this is rather difficult to standardize in a non-platform dependent way.

Thanks you Johan for taking time to prepare the answers!

Are you using, consulting, training, authoring books, etc in Java EE 6 ? Drop a comment on this blog and I’ll line you up for the Q&A session

The Java EE 6 hub is your key resource to learn all about the technology.

And you can always try all Java EE 6 features in GlassFish. Here is an extensive of Java EE 6 & GlassFish demos is available.

Technorati: javaee6 community feedback johanvos glassfish v3

4998 attendees registered and participated at the 11th edition of FISL – the biggest open source conference in Brazil. This was my second year at FISL. Even though the attendance was slightly down from last year but there was no let down in the energy. With 13 parallel tracks and sessions running from 9am to 11pm, it can be absolutely overwhelming. However most of the sessions were in Portuguese (with no English translation) so I could not attend.

I presented on the Java EE 6 Toolshow to an audience of approx 200. This slides-free session showed how NetBeans 6.9 provides comprehensive tooling around Java EE 6 and GlassFish 3. The session showed:

• Simplicity and ease-of-use for creating Java EE 6 web applications
• Boost productivity using Deploy-on-Save and Session-preservation across multiple redeployments
• JSP, Servlets 3.0, EJB 3.1 in Java EE 6 web apps
• Database access using Java Persistence API 2.0
• Using Facelets with Java Server Faces 2.0
• Contexts & Dependency Injection 1.0 with JSF 2
• RESTful Web services using JAX-RS

The screencast #30 made the session delivery quite a breeze and you can watch the entire session by watching the multi-part screencasts.

Meeting Bruno Souza and Fabiane Nardon was a good highlight of the trip. They are both fairly well known in the Brazilian community and we shared stories from last year’s presence of Sun Microsystems at FISL. Check out their latest adventure at toolscloud.com where they provide open source tools-based development environment in the cloud.

Personally, I stayed for only couple of days because I had to come back to run a race (more on that in next blog) and attend a wedding over the weekend. A short trip but always good to spend face-to-face time with the local community.

Check out some pictures from the trip:

And the complete album at:

Technorati: conf fisl brazil oracle glassfish javaee6 netbeans

This 5-part screencast shows how NetBeans 6.9 provides comprehensive tooling for Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3. The video tutorial starts with building a simple Java EE 6 application and evolves to add features from several new technologies such as Java Persistence API 2, Java Server Faces 2, Contexts & Dependency Injection, and Java API for RESTful Web services from the platform. Specifically, the different parts show:

1. How to create a simple Java EE 6 application using JSP, Servlets 3, and EJB 3.1
2. Reading values from a database table using Java Persistence API 2 POJO entities
3. Create a template-based website using Facelets with Java Server Faces 2
4. Use Contexts & Dependency Injection with JSF 2
5. Publish a RESTful Web service using JAX-RS

Enjoy!

Note, this is a playlist of all the videos so click on little arrows (shown as "<" or ">") to view the different videos.

Please give us feedback on GlassFish Forums.

Technorati: screencast javaee6 glassfish tutorial netbeans

Java Road Trip is a tour across 20 cities in the United States showcasing Oracle’s commitment to everything Java.

I talked about Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3 at the New Orleans yesterday. The day started with an overcast sky, caught up with heat wave around the country (around 91 degrees), showed a reflection of super humidity (about 80%), and then ended with a thunder, lightning, and a heavy downpour while I was boarding the flight to back home.

The venue of the event was University of New Orleans but the taxi driver had no clue, even after talking to multiple folks, on how to reach there. But finally we reached after calling up his taxi company, asking at a Shell station, entering a different university, and talking to a cop. I can only we did not loose any attendees because of the location.

There were about 30 attendees spread across 3 parallel running sessions. I talked about simplicity, light-weight, extensible, and power of Java EE 6. There were no slides and only demos – after all, code is king! The key points shown were:

• Servlets 3.0 make "web.xml" optional and instead use annotations to specify that information
• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) can be bundled in a WAR file.
• Java Server Faces 2 uses Facelets as the templating language. This allows templates to be created and applied across different .XHTML pages easily. The different scopes allow the bean to be used appropriately.
• Creation of Java Persistence API (JPA) entity classes from a database table.
• Creation of RESTful resources – can be done as a simple root resource or generate from a database table or an entity.

All of these features were demonstrated using NetBeans although all of them can be easily achieved using Eclipse as well. A consolidated list of Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3 Demos will help you feel some of the features mentioned above.

Here are some other relevant links for the Road Trip:

• Schedule
• Speakers

Many more cities (Austin, Houston, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland) are planned before the trip makes it final stop at the San Francisco Bay Area. So make sure to catch up on a local or near by city and talk to speakers from Oracle. 

On a personal note, the hotel was in the French Quarter neighborhood so there was lot to see around. Being in the downtown, I had to restrict myself with indoor running only. The flight out of New Orleans got delayed because of thunder, lightning, and heavy downpour and so I missed my connection but caught the tail-end of a birthday party I was supposed to attend back home.

Anyway check out some pictures from the New Orleans stop:

Check out the complete album:

Technorati: conf neworleans javaroadtrip glassfish v3 javaee6 netbeans oracle

The is a consolidated list of all the Java EE 6 blog entries published on this blog so far:

• TOTD #139: Asynchronous Request Processing using Servlets 3.0 and Java EE 6
• TOTD #137: Asynchronous EJB, a light-weight JMS solution – Feature-rich Java EE 6
• TOTD #136: Default Error Page using Servlets 3.0 – Improved productivity using Java EE 6
• TOTD #135: JSF2 Composite Components using NetBeans IDE – lightweight Java EE 6
• TOTD #133: JPA2 (JPQL & Criteria), JavaDB, and embedded GlassFish – perfect recipe for testing
• TOTD #132: Servlets 3.0 in Embedded GlassFish Reloaded – lightweight Java EE 6
• TOTD #128: EJBContainer.createEJBContainer: Embedded EJB using GlassFish v3
• TOTD #123: f:ajax, Bean Validation for JSF, CDI for JSF and JPA 2.0 Criteria API – all in one Java EE 6 sample application
• TOTD #120: Deployment Descriptor-free Java EE 6 application using JSF 2.0 + EJB 3.1 + Servlets 3.0
• TOTD #112: Exposing Oracle database tables as RESTful entities using JAX-RS, GlassFish, and NetBeans
• TOTD #109: How to convert a JSF managed bean to JSR 299 bean (Web Beans) ?
• TOTD #108: Java EE 6 web application (JSF 2.0 + JPA 2.0 + EJB 3.1) using Oracle, NetBeans, and GlassFish
• TOTD #102: Java EE 6 (Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1) wizards in Eclipse
• TOTD #101: Applying Servlet 3.0/Java EE 6 “web-fragment.xml” to Lift – Deploy on GlassFish v3
• TOTD #99: Creating a Java EE 6 application using MySQL, JPA 2.0 and Servlet 3.0 with GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse
• TOTD #98: Create a Metro JAX-WS Web service using GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse
• TOTD #95: EJB 3.1 + Java Server Faces 2.0 + JPA 2.0 web application – Getting Started with Java EE 6 using NetBeans 6.8 M1 & GlassFish v3
• TOTD #94: A simple Java Server Faces 2.0 + JPA 2.0 application – Getting Started with Java EE 6 using NetBeans 6.8 M1 & GlassFish v3
• TOTD #93: Getting Started with Java EE 6 using NetBeans 6.8 M1 & GlassFish v3 – A simple Servlet 3.0 + JPA 2.0 app
• TOTD #91: Applying Java EE 6 "web-fragment.xml" to Apache Wicket – Deploy on GlassFish v3
• TOTD #82: Getting Started with Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1 in Java EE 6 using NetBeans 6.7

Feel free to use any of them in your presentations or webinars or anywhere else.

What other Java EE 6 demos would you like to see ?

Technorati: javaee6 glassfish v3 demos netbeans eclipse

This blog entry is third (previous ones) in the Java EE 6 feedback from the community series. You can learn about how Java EE 6 is currently being used in production, development and deployment environments used within the community, and even feature requests for Java EE 7.

This entry comes from Antonio Goncalves – a senior software architect specialized in Java / Java EE working as a consultant. He started working with Java in 1998 and quickly with J2EE in 1999. He published a first book (in French) about Java EE 5 in 2007 and became a JCP Expert Member of various JSRs in 2008 (Java EE 6, JPA 2.0 and EJB 3.1). He is a member of the OSSGTP (Open Source Solution Get Together Paris), co-leader of the Paris JUG and has been awarded Java Champion. Follow him on Twitter (http://twitter.com/agoncal) and read his blog (http://agoncal.wordpress.com/).

Here is a short summary of Java EE 6 from him:

Jigsaw puzzle, Modular, standard, less xml, easy, easy, have I said easy?

Read on for other fun stuff …

1. How are you using Java EE 6 today? What limits your adoption ?

The first use case of using with Java EE 6 is to develop anything I need to develop, any prototype.

• Need to write a quick task processing a database? Java EE 6.
• Need to develop a quick admin site with a few pages interacting with an LDAP directory? Java EE 6.
• Need to expose a RESTful web service? Java EE 6.

The platform became so integrated, as well as being so modular, and so simple to use, that any simple use case is a perfect excuse to use Java EE 6 (take a transactional EJB 3.1, a few JPA 2.0 entities, package everything in a war, no interfaces, no XML, and you are done).

The second use case is to use some bits of Java EE 6 as a jigsaw puzzle at my customers. The beauty of EE 6 is that most specifications can be used separately. At the moment I’m using Bean Validation and JPA 2.0 under Tomcat, no need to use the full platform not to deploy it to a full compliant application server.

In my case, Spring is limiting a wider adoption of Java EE 6. Only very recently Spring Web Flow has started to support bits of JSF 2.0. The day it fully supports it, I will be able to add a few extra specs in my applications.

Another technological limitation is the limited number of containers that implement Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1. Today, only GlassFish and Resin implement the Web Profile (and the full profile for GlassFish). But JSF 2.0 can run on Servlet 2.5 (i.e Tomcat 6.x).

2. What Java EE 6 technologies are you using and why ?

In fact, if the question was "What Java EE 6 technologies are you NOT using and why?" I would have answered Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1 because they need containers (even if EJB 3.1 has an embeddable container that goes with it) and as I said, there is still a lack of containers implementing them. The rest of Java EE 6 can be used on a per-specification basis. At my customers I use any piece of Java EE 6 that I can. Bean Validation 1.0 and JPA 2.0 are so easy and well integrated that I use them as much as I can. The integration between Bean Validation and JSF 2.0 is also very handy. JAX-RS is a fantastic RESTful web services API that you can use with Servlet 2.5 containers such as Tomcat 6.x. I’m not even talking about JMS, JAX-WS and JTA that I use on a day to day basis.

3. What is your development and deployment environment?

I am an IntelliJ Idea addict. I gave up trying to figure out how Eclipse tries to work and which plugins to install (sorry, it’s not called plugins now but OSGI bundles, the ones you start and stop at runtime… what a joke). Once in a while I use NetBeans, but the Java EE 6 support with Intellij is really amazing. And then, I really have two different kinds of usages: GlassFish, H2 and MySQL and at my customers it’s more Tomact, WebLogic, Websphere (unfortunately) and Oracle. Even if I have lots of complaints about Maven, I use it everywhere so I can be IDE-agnostic when I need to build my projects.

4. What previous versions of Java EE / J2EE have you used ? How has the migration to Java EE 6 benefited ?

Being a former BEA employee from 1999 and 2001, I can say that I’ve used all versions of the Java EE platform (from J2EE 1.2). The early versions being a very painful experience. I did a lot of Entity Beans CMP and it was a real nightmare. I remember the very first EJBs when the deployment descriptor was serialized and then it became XML files. Migrating from Entity CMPs to JPA was not easy as you had to go to your customer and say "sorry, we lied to you, Entity Beans CMP are not great and guess what? you need to throw your code to the bin and start with a fresh JPA 1.0 domain model". Like everybody I moved to Struts, Hibernate and Spring. But I quickly realized that I wasn’t an XML fan and found Spring was becoming too complex and messy for my needs. Since Java EE 5 development on server side has been simplified with convention over configuration with containers doing most of the work. Migration and portability has improved, I often work with customers who develop Java EE 5 application on one application server and deploy it in another. Java EE 6 goes even further in terms of portability.

5. Describe the benefits of Java EE 6 to you in 120 characters.

Jigsaw puzzle, Modular, standard, less xml, easy, easy, have I said easy?

6. Advice for anybody who is looking at Java EE 6 for their next project ?

Well, first of all you should buy my book ;o) (http://apress.com/book/view/1430219548) Java EE 6 is modular; don’t see it as a blob. Take the bits and pieces that you need. Start with JPA 2.0 and Bean Validation, that’s easy. If you can, add JSF 2.0 that will simplify configuration, resources management and component development. Take JAX-RS if you do RESTful applications. For injection, and many more, use Weld (the CDI implementation) that runs also on Tomcat. If you do Spring 3.x, think of using @Inject (unfortunately Spring doesn’t implement CDI). If you then can use GlassFish or Resin, these are the two implementations ready to execute your EJBs 3.1 (JBoss 6 is on the way). Because Java EE 6 is so simple, don’t over engineer your code: interfaces are not always needed; DAOs are not always needed either… KISS and refactor your code later if you really need it.

The final word is, add Java EE 6 specification to your project in an incremental way. When you can get rid of a proprietary framework and change it to a standard one, do so. You will avoid "vendor locking" (or "open source framework locking", as open source is different from open standard). And use design patterns when you really need them.

7. What new features you’d like to see in Java EE 7 ?

What I really miss in Java EE 6 is something similar to Spring Web Flow or Seam Page Flow. I hope that in Java EE 7 a new specification will come and standardize flow management (for JSF, of course, but something more general letting you manage different sorts of flows).

Batch processing is also something missing. Spring Batch is very good and defines well known principals such as jobs, steps an
d so one. With EJB 3.1 there is a new Timer Service (inspired from cron and as rich as Quartz). It’s time to get a Batch processing specification that can be easily scheduled.

Security is also a difficult point. JAAS is too low level. Even if there are some improvements in the Servlet 3.0 API, there is still room to tight the platform together in terms of security.

Packaging could also be changed in Java EE 7. We talk a lot about OSGi these days. As a developer I found it too difficult, I would like the EE 7 platform to simplify the creation of bundles (OSGi or something different but compatible). I’m also hoping that Java SE 7 will become more modular. Modularity in Java SE 7 + OSGi packaging in EE 7 would be a great combination.

And I remember talking to Adam Bien about it, JMS hasn’t changed for more than a decade, it should benefit from the novelties of the platform and get simpler.

In a word, I would like Java EE 7 to get richer (more specs), simpler (less code to write) and more integrated (security is one example).

Are you using, consulting, training, authoring books, etc in Java EE 6 ? Drop a comment on this blog and I’ll line you up for the Q&A session

The Java EE 6 hub is your key resource to learn all about the technology.

And you can always try all Java EE 6 features in GlassFish.

Technorati: javaee6 community feedback antoniogoncalves glassfish v3