JAX London had its second conference of the year and the venue was shared with DevCon and OSGi DevCon. The tri-partite conference gave the attendees an option to attend a variety of sessions from a good quality of speakers. There were about approximately 250 attendees and I think the number is commendable considering this is only the second conference. The good news is that there is only room to grow 
I gave a presentation on "Running your Java EE applications in the Cloud" and the slides are available below:
The talk explained
- Oracle’s definition of Cloud and talked about Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, a.k.a "Cloud in a box"
- Light-weight ness, extensibility, and simplicity/ease-of-use of Java EE 6
- How to run Java EE 6 on Amazon, RightScale, Elastra, and Joyent
- What Java EE currently offers for the Cloud and what’s coming in Java EE 7
Because of a last minute speaker cancellation for the JAX Community Night I also got a chance to show a live demo of how NetBeans provides extensive and powerful tooling around Java EE 6 & GlassFish. Check out screencast #30 to view the complete set of Java EE 6 Netbeans tooling. Java EE 6 tooling is also available in Eclipse and can be seen in the screencast #31.
I had a good conversation with Sebastien Meyen who is the organizer of JAX conferences and hopefully you’ll see more presence of Java EE 6 & GlassFish in their upcoming events 
He recorded a video segment for JAX TV and the link will be shared when its live.
Barry Cranford, London JUG leader, graciously arranged for a talk at their local meeting. And of course I talked on the Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3: Light-weight, Extensible, and Powerful and the slides are available below:
The talk explained how Java EE 6 is an extreme makeover from its previous versions and provides a light-weight, extensible, and powerful platform to build your enterprise and Web applications. The talk explained how several new key specifications like Contexts & Dependency Injection, Bean Validation, and Java API for RESTful Web Services 1.1 in the platform are making it really powerful and rich. It also explained how the existing specifications like Java Server Faces, Servlets, Java Persistence API, and Enterprise Java Beans have gone over an extreme makeover to make the platform easier and intuitive to use. And its always fun to talk about the latest set of features coming in GlassFish 3.1 like Clustering, High Availability, Application Versioning, SSH-based Administration and Provisioning, and Application-scoped Resources. The Java EE 6 code sample built during the meeting can be downloaded here.
Here is some feedback posted on the event page:
Great speaker and great talk, with a perfect pace and content!
It was great. I particularly like that it was presented with examples, and you could really see how it works, and not only someone explaining how it would work
This was a very insightful and engaging session with a good mix of technical detail and completely live demo. The presenter was very skilled and knowledgeable and had a great way of expressing concepts and details easily.
Great presentation and demos. Had underestimated the tooling in Netbeans IDE so the demos were great. Good opportunity to meet Arun Gupta, whose blog I spend time reading
Very good presentation. The key point that Glassfish restores session information over multiple restarts was very helpfull for me. Also learnt quite a few titbits throughout the presentation , which I am sure will come very handy.
An excellent presentation which covered a good subset of a very wide topic to an adequate depth. A great overview of some of the compelling new features in JEE6.
Now this is London and pub culture is very prominent here, yes even on weekdays So we got together at a nearby pub – The Slaughtered Lamb – and it was good discussing with JUG attendees and fellow beer drinkers on why Oracle will do the right thing for Java.
Most of the major European conferences like Devoxx, JFall, and JFokus are organized by a local JUG. I seeded that thought with Sebastien and Barry and hopefully the energies will synthesize and the conference will grow. Overall, a short visit for me but gave me an opportunity to meet with several other speakers and create more community connections for GlassFish, and in general for Oracle
Let us know how are you using GlassFish by posting a comment on this blog.
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