Caucho had another great JavaOne in 2011, with well-received sessions by Reza and a high level of interest at the Caucho booth. Theresa, Alexandra, Rick and I were scheduled to split time in our booth, but it was so busy we all ended up spending almost the entire time there. We particularly enjoyed meeting a few current Resin users to get a chance to put a face with the name.

Reza usually does our post-conference wrap-up, but I thought I would take it on this year with the intention of relaying some of the “buzz” of this year’s conference based on discussion with all the folks that stopped by our booth.

Overview

We all felt Oracle did a better job promoting and managing the conference this year than last. People commented that it seemed to be a more professional and comfortable atmosphere. Oracle certainly had a lot of space available also, utilizing 3 hotels and an entire city street as an open-air café. It was probably necessary since attendance was rumored to be double that of last year.

We also thought the crowd this year was made up of a higher percentage of more senior folks like architects and managers rather than developers. Quite a few of these were from current WebSphere shops that seemed to be looking for lower cost alternatives. The current economy is likely the cause in both cases. In any case, I think Oracle seems to lending credibility and professionally to Java.

Cloud

There was definite interest in cloud this year and people stopped by our booth to ask about Caucho’s cloud technology. Resin’s triad hub-spoke model and dynamic deployment based on .git seemed to impress everyone we talked to. Check out the cloud deployment demo we had running on a loop at the booth.

I had the impression that this year folks were taking cloud seriously and looking for solutions, as opposed to last year people were still questioning if this cloud thing was real. 3 PAAS vendors were present and it looks possible to run Resin or ResinEmbed on all of them; Heroku, CloudBees, and Jelastic.

JEE6

The various components of JEE6 were the topic of many sessions, and the application server vendors were busy. There was buzz about CDI and JSF 2.0.

I estimated that about 50 percent of the people that I spoke to were aware of JEE6 WebProfile. Probably the most common question we heard was, “what’s the difference between EBJ and EJB Lite.” The easiest answer is EJB Lite is EJB 3.1 without CORBA and EJB2 backwards compatibility. Of course there’s more to it than that. Part 3 of Reza’s Java EE 6 Overview article on TheServerSide does a good job explaining the details.

Arquillian was also a hot technology that seems to have emerged as the choice for easy JEE6 testing. The one session I made time to attend was an intro to Arquillian, and I have to say it’s more impressive than I realized. They have a very extensible framework that makes testing other frameworks quite easy. Arquillian also won and a Duke’s Choice Award. Resin’s Arquillian plugin is available on GitHib.

Distributed Caching

Quite a few people I talked to were surprised to learn Resin provides distributed caching. This is something we’re actively working on and have been keeping up with the changing JSR 107 specification. Speaking of JCache, I was pleasantly surprised at the general familiarity with JSR 107. Most folks seemed satisfied that Resin is supporting the JCache API and were interested in learning more.

Other Thoughts

JRebel was a popular booth and the also won a Duke’s Choice Award. They offer an interesting JVM plugin that enables fast seamless code hot-deployment.

Vaadin seemed to impress folks, offering a framework for building rich web applications using mostly server-side logic and Ajax technology.

SpringSource had a huge booth that appeared to be nearly empty most of the time. I also thought there were relatively few sessions regarding Spring. A quick search of the content catalog yields 13 results for Spring and 20 for CDI. Encouraging statistics for the JEE6/CDI camp!

Oracle really seems to be pushing JavaFX but it’s not clear to me how many people are interested… There were 56 sessions in the catalog regarding JavaFX and they had a sizable demo area setup. One cool demo used Java to interface with a Kinect sensor to have an onscreen Duke mirror the user’s movement.

Conclusion

Thanks to all the folks that stopped by the booth to talk and register for our raffle. Congratulations to the winner Paul S. who took home a Dean electric guitar. I thought we had easily the best giveaway item; interest was intense! We encourage you to visit us at TSSJS and JavaOne in 2012. We’re planning to have a live demo of Resin cloud deployment that should be awesome.

Tags: javaone

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