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.
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After a long few months of hard-work, we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for getting Resin 4 Java EE 6 Web Profile certified!

We are now passing the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2,  EL 1.2, JSTL 1.2, JSF 2.0, Bean Validation 1.0, CDI 1.0, JPA 2.0, JPA 2.0 and JMS 1.1 TCKs. Note, although JMS is not part of the Java EE 6 Web Profile, we are still implementing it since a number of our customers have asked for a lightweight messaging option in Resin.

The last TCK that we need to pass at this point in order to be Java EE 6 Web Profile compliant is EJB 3.1 Lite. As such, we do have the basic functionality for stateless session beans, stateful session beans and singleton beans including life-cycle, concurrency, registry/look-up, interceptors, security and transactions. Indeed, Adam Bien recently blogged about the usability of the current Resin 4 development release: http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/java_ee_6_server_resin and we have been demoing full-stack Java EE 6 applications for a while now including at JavaOne 2010 (albeit without EJBs, using EJB service annotations/aspects directly in CDI managed beans).

Resin TCK Progress

At this point, it is a matter of working through the cases caught by the EJB 3.1 Lite TCK. I’d say a majority of it is minor bug-fixes with singletons having the most and stateless session beans the least amount of issues.

Although technically not part of EJB 3.1 Lite, we are also implementing scheduling, asynchronous processing, remoting (Hessian based) and message driven beans because we feel these are valuable parts of the EJB specification. We will also include a JCA implementation for better resource pluggability. At this point, we have the basic functionality of timers/scheduling as well as asynchronous processing done. The remoting and the message-driven bean/JCA parts still need significant work, including creating a new messaging model around CDI events as a supplement to the older message driven bean model. My personal guess is that we will have the officially Java EE 6 Web Profile certified release of Resin 4 by the end of the year. We will then have a few releases focused purely on stability, optimization, foot-print, start-up/shut-down time and runtime performance since these have always been primary differentiators for Resin.

The final release of Resin 4 will allow us to then focus on some of the work around CDI portable extensions that we wish to do including Seam 3 modules/Arquillian integration as well as things like HTML5/WebSocket, modularity, cloud/NoSQL APIs, etc.

Obviously, Resin 4 is a very important milestone for us as a team but is very significant for the Java EE 6 ecosystem too. I would expect the JBoss guys to announce their final Java EE 6 compatible version shortly after us, probably followed by Geronimo, WebLogic, etc.  It seems IBM has been uncharacteristically proactive with the WebSphere Java EE 6 work too.

In the meanwhile, do send us your comments and wish us luck on the final stretch of the Java EE 6 implementation marathon!

Overall, Caucho had a great JavaOne this year. Our talks went very well, the booth attendance was great and a number of people showed up at the meet-and-greet.

The first session we did was the Resin 4 Java EE 6 Web Profile talk titled “Resin: A Light-footed Java EE 6 Web Profile Platform”. This was the first time Emil and I co-presented and I thought it went very well. The attendance was moderate but we had a number of good questions and a handful of folks asked for the slides/demo code afterwards. That same evening I did a CDI BOF with Dan Allen of Red Hat/JBoss and David Blevins of Apache OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB. The BOF was titled “Implementing CDI: Goals, Milestones, and Perspectives” and was well-attended. We had lively discussion around the current state of implementations, the CDI ecosystem as well as the future of CDI/Java EE. A lot of folks gave us positive feedback on the BOF, particularly on our plans going forward for Java EE.

My first talk for the second day of the conference was the Java EE testing talk with my EJB 3 in Action co-author Debu Panda titled “Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques”. It was a full house and the talk went very well although we ran out of time and could not demo JAX-WS/JAX-RS testing. The talk covered end-to-end testing along the entire Java EE stack including Servlet 3, JSF 2, EJB 3.1, JPA 2, JAX-WS and JAX-RS using existing and emerging tools like JUnit, HttpUnit, HtmlUnit, Cactus, Selenium, JSFUnit, embedded containers, embedded databases, Arquillian/ShrinkWrap, Resin JUnit integration support and soapUI. We got excellent feedback for the talk. It was only somewhat surprising that folks don’t realize how robust Java EE testing is with the latest release and tools like Arquillian. Debu was in great form for the talk as usual. In the evening I did an EJB 3.1 BOF with Linda Demichael of Sun/Oracle, Mike Keith of Sun/Oracle, David Blevins of Apache OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB as well as Andy Rubinger of JBoss/Red Hat titled “Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) Community Discussion”. The attendance was moderate but the discussion was very lively. It was very encouraging that we were more-or-less on the same page about the future direction of the EJB spec.

The last session I did for the conference was on Wednesday. It was a panel with Adam Bien, Emmanuel Bernard of JBoss/Red Hat, Krasimir Semerdzhiev of SAP, Roberto Chinnici of Sun/Oracle, David Blevins of OpenWebBeans/OpenEJB and Jim Knutson of IBM titled “Java EE 6 Panel: What Do We Do Now?”. The panel was moderated by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine of Sun/Oracle. He blogged about the panel here. It was a full-house and we had very lively discussion. I talked with several of the panelists afterwards and it was very encouraging that folks are actively thinking about what really should be done in Java EE 7 and mirrored what we are doing in Resin/CanDI.

The material for our talks is posted here.

A good number of folks stopped by at the Caucho booth to talk to us. We had an excellent location this year for the booth and people either saw us first or last. We can only hope we are that lucky next year! The meet-and-greet was good too and met up with a handful of friends including Andrew Schaefer and Ryan de Laplante. I also of course met up with the usual suspects from JBoss, SpringSource, Apache, Sun/Oracle, etc throughout the conference.

I have mixed feelings about the conference itself. The programming and organization was great but I could not help but feel that JavaOne was demoted. I think a lot of developers have this same sentiment and I hope Sun/Oracle will do better next time.

There’s still one more day of sessions left at JavaOne, but the Pavilion with all the booths is now closed, so I thought I’d give my impressions of some of what we saw from the booth. Almost all of the Caucho staff was at the booth at some point and because the company is mostly composed of engineers, we were able to have a lot of useful technical discussions there. These are some of the hot topics that people wanted to talk about:
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We’ve been pretty busy around here, working on the new Resin 4 cloud features (PDF) and improving the performance of Quercus (PDF), so soon it’ll be time to talk about it! We just got some good news yesterday that I’ll be speaking at JavaOne about Quercus performance. Here’s the session info for that talk. Right now, I’m scheduled for Tuesday, June 2 at 4:40PM in Esplanade 301.

I’ll also be talking about Resin 4’s cloud features a little later in June at Jazoon in Zurich. Check out the session info here. I hope you can make it to see one or both of the talks!

JavaOne wrapped up last week and I think it was very successful for Caucho. We had a few hundred people drop by the booth to learn about Resin, Quercus, and Hessian. A number of users of all of these technologies dropped by as well to let us know how we’re doing. Thanks to everyone who stopped in!

If you’re using Resin, Quercus, or Hessian in a project, let us know! We’re really interested in how you’re using the products, even if you haven’t purchased a professional license or support. All of our products have an open source component and for a lot of projects, that’s all you need.

I also did a couple of interviews during the show, one for Java Posse, which will hopefully show up in a podcast soon and one with Tony Baer of onStrategies, who blogged about Quercus. Look for Caucho to show up in the news more and more over the coming weeks. We’ve got a lot going on…

Have you dropped by our booth at JavaOne yet? Today’s your last chance! We’re at booth #518, just to the left of the Parasoft and Ericsson booths as you walk in. You can still win a set of noise canceling headphones, get a free evaluation license, play our interactive Sudoku game, talk to Caucho engineers, and more!

Last week I was working on our demo for JavaOne. It’s pretty much done, except for one small feature and I’m pretty excited about it. It uses our new HMTP (Hessian Messaging Transfer Protocol) to send messages back and forth between client and server. The demo itself is a Sudoku game where you play against another player on the same board. It requires both RPC style communication and messaging, both of which are natively supported by HMTP. Anyway, I’ll give a much more coherent explanation soon as I’m writing up a fact sheet and animation to show message flow today. We might be able to bring up the game live this week, so stay tuned for a link…

The demo is implemented in Flex 3 (open source :-)) using the AS3 implementation of Hessian and HMTP. I want to send a shout out to Riccardo Cohen who has been working with Hessian Flash. He was nice enough to write up a few tutorials to show how to use it with entity beans. Check it out here: Riccardo Cohen’s tutorials. Thanks, Riccardo!

Have you ever wondered how best to get in contact with us? We’ve got plenty of ways to talk to Caucho engineers and users depending on how you’d like to interact or what issues you’re having. Let’s go down the list:

• Caucho Blogs - You’re already reading it, feel free to comment!
• Mailing lists
• Forums (running on Drupal on Quercus)
• Bug tracker - If you have bugs, this is the best way to get us to fix them. We like to keep our bug count low.
• Email - There are a number of email addresses that you may want to use:
  • sales@caucho.com - Our sales team
  • presales@caucho.com - Presales support for people evaluating Resin Pro
  • hiring@caucho.com - Looking for a job? We’re always on the look out for excellent engineers.
  • emil@caucho.com - Me! I’m Emil Ong, the Chief Evangelist of Caucho, and I’m always interested in hearing about your success stories with Caucho products, press or speaking opportunities, or anything else about promoting Caucho.
• Conferences
  • JavaOne - We’ll have a booth where you can visit us… more info on our booth number later…
  • AjaxWorld - I’ll be giving a talk about Comet on March 19