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!

Chris Chen has a nice description of messaging use cases from resin-interest:

I think integration is interesting, but more relevant are the use
cases surrounding each type of system.

*) BAM - lightweight for super fast and scalable message brokering for
things such as stock market price streaming (no need for persistence)
or twittering type messages. The main thing here is “as fast as
computerly possible”.

*) JMS/persistent subscriptions - These are for those that broker
highly mission-critical data. The primary interest here is “as
reliable as possible”. Speed is less of a concern compared to the
data. Inherently, this type of use conflicts with BAM. Transactions
will bog down the speed.

*) ESB/SOA activities - these, in my view, are for those that require
high data/service compatibility and integration. The message here is
“as promiscuous as possible”. The focus is on the adapters and being
able to communicate and connect to many different systems.

I think all of them centers around a hub-spoke model. It’s possible
to integrate all of them together through layers. The lowest layer
(in this case, BAM) focuses entirely on speed. A secondary layer can
add the reliability that can be similar to XEP persistence. Possibly
a persistence component that subscribes and listens to any topic/queue
that requires such a service and separately deals with reliability. A
third component can create a set of adapters to connect to different
systems. This third component mainly focuses on data/message
translation.

Woohoo! I’m pretty excited about this one. There are so many new cool features. Here’s the list:

• Resin IoC - Fully WebBeans (JSR-299) compliant IoC container
• Embedded Resin - Use Resin in an existing application or within a unit testing framework like JUnit.
• Support for gobs of 3rd-party packages: Maven2, Ivy, Mule, Struts2, CXF, Wicket, and more!
• Lots of updates to security, including an update to the authenticator configuration
• Exposure of the Resin JMS queues as BlockingQueues
• Watchdog updates
• Security updates
• Resin remoting

Wow… there are a lot of features there. I was going to write a bigger entry to cover everything, but I think now that it would be better if I split it up. Over the next few days, I’ll be writing more in depth entries about each of these features. It’ll probably take a week…