I just came back from a trip to the Raleigh, NC area to record a JavaLobby Tech Chat on Resin 4 (last year Emil did a Tech Chat that you might have seen). The Tech Chat went great. Mitch Pronschinske, the Editor-in-Chief of JavaLobby/DZone drove the Chat. Not to give away too much right now but we talked about:

• Past/present/future of Resin
• Defining characteristics of Resin - lightweight, standard and feature-complete
• Resin 4 Java EE 6 Web Profile certification
• Java EE Web Profile leadership
• How it stacks up against Tomcat/JBoss/GlassFish/WebLogic/WebSphere
• Small, dedicated, agile World class engineering team
• CDISource - a vendor-neutral space for all things CDI
• The CDISource Spring/CDI bridge
• Possibilities for Java EE 7/Java EE 8 (open for participation from you!)
• Early Resin WebSocket support
• Resin support for private clouds

Keep your eye on JavaLobby - the Tech Chat should be out there soon!

I chose to drive to NC to avoid the hassle of flying and because NC is quite drivable from my home office in Philly. On the way back, I did CDI demos at both the Research Triangle JUG and the NoVA/Washington, D.C. JUG. Both talks were very well attended. The interest/participation levels were fantastic. The DZone folks gave me a few nice printed copies of the CDI RefCard. Every single copy was taken and people were asking for more! They also asked me for the slide deck and code examples. I’ll send them to the JUG leads to post on the JUG websites. You can also take a look at the slide deck and code examples if you want and send me any follow-up questions. I also wanted to talk at the Maryland and Richmond JUGs but things didn’t quite work out schedule-wise this time around. Both JUGs are working on scheduling me to speak in the Fall instead.

TSSJS 2011 went extremely well for us. Our talks/events went very well and the booth attendance was great. I think the TSSJS 2011 agenda, quality of content/speakers and buzz was the best in years. The new TSS editor Cameron McKenzie did an admirable job at putting everything together.  Some of the notable speakers included James Gosling, Steve Harris (SVP Oracle), Adam Messinger (VP Oracle), Patrick Curran (JCP chair), Rod Johnson, Bill Burke, Adam Bien and Kirk Pepperdine.

I started the conference with a 5-minute lightning round presentation on Resin 4, the Java EE 6 Web Profile, our vision, history, thought leadership, values, global footprint and growing customer base. The presentation seemed to go over well with a number of existing customers and developers reaching out to us afterwards.

The first session on the first day of the conference I did was my enterprise caching talk titled “Effective Caching Across Enterprise Application Tiers”. The talk covers the different flavors of caching in the web (HTTP), presentation, application, domain, infrastructure (persistence) and resource (database) tiers using mechanisms like proxy caching (especially as supported by Resin), JSF/CDI @ApplicationScoped, @SessionScoped, @ConversationScoped, @ViewScoped, @RequestScoped scopes, passivation, EJB pooling, EJB thread-safe singletons, extended persistence contexts, JPA first (transactional) and second (shared) level caching, database connection pools, prepared statement caching, JCache as well as distributed caching APIs like Coherence, Terracotta, GigaSpaces, Infinispan, EHCache, JCS, SwarmCache and OSCache. The talk was very well attended, the Q&A was good and I got great feedback afterwards. In the evening, I participated in the “Meet the Authors” event. TSSJS gave away two copies of EJB 3 in Action (I am currently working on the second edition) and I signed both copies for the winners. I had a few engaging conversations on topics like EJB/Spring, authoring and the JCP during the course of the evening.

I started the second and busiest day of the conference with a panel titled “The Java Community Process: What’s Broken and How to Fix It”. This was a panel with Patrick Curran, James Gosling and me, moderated by Cameron McKenzie. We discussed the need for reforming the JCP, greater transparency, the Apache Harmony licensing issues, more non-Oracle spec leadership and more participation from non-vendor affiliated independents. We all agreed that many ills in the JCP can be cured through greater interest and participation from the developer community. The panel generated a great deal of interest, attendance, participation and feedback. After lunch, I gave my “A Quick Tour of the CDI Landscape” talk. The talk is a broad overview of the vibrant CDI landscape composed of implementations, supported runtimes, portable extensions and tools. I discussed Weld, CanDI, OpenWebBeans, GlassFish, JBoss AS, Resin, Geronimo, WebLogic, WebSphere, Tomcat, OpenEJB, TomEE, JOnAS, Seam 3, Apache MyFaces CODI, the ZK Framework, Arquillian, Forge, JBoss Tools, Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ. The audience was great and I had some lively discussions afterwards. Later in the afternoon, I did my Java EE testing talk titled “Testing Java EE 6 Applications: Tools and Techniques”. The talk covers 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. The talk was well attended and I 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. In the evening, I participated in the “Ask the Experts” session which also went very well.

The last day of the conference I presented my talk titled “An Introduction to Seam 3″.The talk discusses the relationship between CDI, Weld and Seam 3 as well as covering all the Seam 3 modules such as XML configuration, persistence, Faces, Servlet, JMS, REST, JavaScript remoting, security, internationalization/localization, exception handling, mail, cron, document generation, Spring interoperability, Wicket, GWT, Drools, jBPM, JBoss ESB and so on. Since it was towards the end of the conference the attendance was relatively sparse but the Q&A session was very good with a lively audience.

A number of folks asked for the slides and demo code, so the materials for the 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 saw us last (almost). I think we had the best booth traffic of any conference so far. The guitar giveaway seemed to go over very well too. We can only hope that next year is just as successful!

This week, I’ve been prepping for a talk on Quercus in which I promised to show a demo of Spring MVC using a PHP view. So that means that I actually had to do it. Turns out it was quite easy and PHP makes for a very nice, compact view technology for Spring MVC. This is a bit of tease since the code for this won’t go out until at least next week, but since a number of people have been asking for this a while, I thought I’d give a preview…

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