JavaOne 2009 Summary: Monday (CommunityOne)

JavaOne has not officially started yet, it's Monday and not Tuesday, it's CommunityOne and not JavaOne, but the community spirit already caught us and punched us into the geeky experience of the world's biggest Java conference in the nice Moscone Center in San Francisco... main focus of today's sessions was on GlassFish stuff... In a nutshell: Niiice!!

So here is our summary of today's CommunityOne day (after having had some beers at the OpenSolaris & Sun Cloud Party in Hall A):

=== Sessions ===

• Sun GlassFish Application Server Portfolio (by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart from Sun): Where Sun's Platform Is Going:
  not much news for us actually... no infos regarding how Oracle want to proceed with GF
• Running Seam on the GlassFish Application Server (by Dan Allen from Red Hat):
  - Seam best works with Hibernate as persistence provider (and looks for it in the classpath). GlassFish v2 comes with Toplink, Glassfish v3 with EclipseLink. Dan Allen from Red Hat made a nice summary of all the tweeks you have to apply in order to make Seam work with GF's default persistence provider.
  - Dan further went into differences of JBoss AS and GlassFish AS which also brought some steps to be done if Seam should run on GF.
  - But: from a developer perspective, such details are not necessarily required to be known as "seam-gen" supports both application servers out of the box. We asked Dan about support of Oracle WebLogic Application Server and he pointed us to a chapter in the Seam documentation. As that is not the whole story (as of my current status), we might come up with our additions soon...
  
• Lightning Talks!
  This special type of talks runs throughout the day, split in multiple parts of 50 minutes each where every part again contains up to 8 very short speaches... I visited part 3 covering:
  - The Mural Project
  - Deep Dive Sneak Peek Sun Learning Services
  - Atmosphere (by JF Arcand!): good to know that Atmosphere is not only useful in containers not supporting Servlet 3.0: it autodetects Servlet 3.0 and still provides a nice abstraction of the rather complex Async API of Servlet 3.0
  - Adding AJAX Push (Ted Goddard from ICEsoft, focusing on ICEfaces of course)
  - Alice
  - BluJ
  - In a summary: Cool to listen to, nice to get an impression of the topic and good as decision maker whether to go to the full sessions on certain topics not already being enrolled in your schedule...
• Developing RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS and Jersey (by Marc Hadley and Paul Sandoz from Sun)
  - The two spec leads of JSR-311 made a quick walkthrough from the architectural style REST to the JSR-311 (JAX-RS) and showed two demos running on the reference implementation Jersey.
  - One demo showed how JCDI (JSR-299, fka WebBeans), Java Contexts and Dependency Injection works together with Jersey using Google Guice. This was interesting, and in a side remark he recommended to have a look at Guicey Fruit running on Guice 2.0. Geeks... but we like it ;-)
  
• EclipseLink - The Road to JPA 2.0 (by Doug Clarke from Oracle and Co-Lead of the EclipseLink project):
  - no much news for us at this moment

=== Pavilion ===

• The Pavilion opened at 3pm. Between the sessions and after 5pm, it was interesting to walk from one booth to the other until 7pm when it closed.
• GlassFish, Portals: We talked to Srikanth Konjarla (Software Architect of Web Space Server, aka WebSynergy Project having the same codebase as the Liferay Portal). He was also not allowed to talk about how Oracle will continue with the GlassFish products like WebSpace Server (Portal) and the GlassFish Application Server... we hope for more details in tomorrow's general session!
• Atlassian: We had quite a deep introduction by Douglas Butler (thanks!) into the new versions of Atlassian's products:
  - JIRA (4.0 beta)
  - Confluence (3.0 released TODAY!!)
  - Fisheye together with Crucible
  - Bamboo and Clover -- Really nice what we have seen here!
  - The new versions generally invested a lot into the visualization of data, hiding complexities by using more wizards but also many things happened from an integration point of view:
  - Atlassian released widgets/gadgets to be deployed into any portlet container in order to create nice dashboards etc.
  - They will also soon provide RESTful interfaces for all their products to freely integrate them into any other app.... This sounds very cool indeed.
  - And the give-away gadgets are nice too ;-) Have a look at their new T-Shirts: If you wear one of those and have it filmed by an Atlassian camera, some things get out of the shirt!! ;-)
  
  - And yes, they acquired GreenHopper (announced TODAY).
  
• Livescribe: At last year's Java One, Livescribe presented their JavaME based pen and sold 150 pieces right after the general session... I also bought one. I'm happy to see that the company still exists and that they heavily extended their features (e.g. Pencasts). At their booth today I got a nice little paper blanks (which is not sold in Europe so far).
• Vaadin: IT Mill has released the 6th version of their server driven RIA framework known as IT Mill Tollkit. Together with the release they rebranded it into Vaadin. It is free, open source and looks actually very much like GWT... The demo looked very nice. Certainly worth having a closer look at it!
• James Gosling: Spotted early at the Pavilion entrance! ;-)
  
  
• Sun Cloud: We haven't had the chance to check out the details of Sun Cloud yet but with the rather big party this evening sponsored by Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris we expect a bigger announcement by tomorrow... so stay tuned.
  
• NUUX: We also met Ben (an Alumni CTP Consultant) at his booth in the Java Utopia corner. Check out his website!!
• Anchor Steam Beer: San Francisco's local beer is really worth to be mentioned here as single item ;-) and it tasted great in the OpenSolaris branded glass!
  
  

=== Bookstore ===

• Bought today:
  - Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3
  - The Definitive Guide to Lift
• More tomorrow ;-) ...
  

=== Tomorrow ===
Sure, lots of interesting session are registered in our schedule, but:
tomorrow is also the long expected JavaPosse BOF from 9.30pm to 10.20pm, so don't expect a summary like this after that :-) We will most probably post a 2-day summary on Wednesday evening... ok?
So cu then! And don't forget to follow Balz @ Twitter for live updates!
- Cheers, Balz & Dani.