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!

Speaking at TSSJS Vegas this year was great. I got to do four talks - a Java EE 6 overview, a Resin demo, a CanDI/CDI demo as well as a talk on the JCP. The Resin talk was one of the keynotes for TSSJS. All talks were well attended and the crowd was great. People seemed genuinely interested in Java EE 6, the Web Profile, CDI and Resin. I got a ton of questions for Q & A, one-on-one afterwards as well as at the booth. Folks were particularly interested in some of the CDI/EJB 3.1 features as well as our portable extensions for JUnit, iBATIS, Quartz, using EJB annotations on managed beans, etc. A good number of people asked for the example code both for the CanDI and Resin talks. I personally enjoyed taking about open participation in the JCP although it was a relatively short and non-technical talk. We will be posting the slides as well as the code examples on the website soon. I hope we get similar success in JavaOne as well as other conferences.

It’s the last day of TSSJS here in Las Vegas and it’s been a really successful and fun conference so far. The skill level of the attendees is great, meaning a lot of meaningful conversations on the industry and trends in development. On Wednesday, our CEO Steve Montal gave a quick 5 minute overview of our current and upcoming technologies like Resin 4 with Java CanDI and cloud support as well as Quercus. There was a lot to pack in, but even this short speech garnered us a lot of attention. We also handed out our Resin 4 whitepaper which I think was well-received.

Thursday was a particularly interesting day because of talks at the beginning and end. Rod Johnson started out with a talk on Spring, where he (once again) declared JavaEE unnecessary and overly complicated. He claimed that an acquisition of Sun by IBM would be meaningless to developers, because nobody cares what they do anyway. It was a bit controversial to say the least. The part that irked me the most was that he claimed that SpringSource is the only independent application server vendor left… Caucho has been around for 10 years and is going strong, even in this economy. We predate Tomcat and SpringSource, so I think Rod was mistaken on this point.

At the end of the day, Reza Rahman lead a discussion of the direction and progress of JavaEE 6. We’re targeting the Web Profile and we’re participating in the JSR-299 (Java CanDI) expert group, so naturally we were interested in the community’s opinion of the new standard. There was an interesting debate on the contents of the Web Profile, with a lot people arguing for a profile that does not include a view technology. Reza explained that the view of the committee was that a JavaEE certified project needs to be able to build a complete application out of the box without add-ons, yet not prevent add-ons. The Web Profile is targeted at the 80% of developers who don’t need the extra bells and whistles of the full profile.

It turns out that the only thing holding up JavaEE 6 is the debate over Java CanDI and whether it should be included. There are not a lot of complaints about the technology itself, but rather its scope. What I found interesting is that while this topic seemed to be very contentious within the JEE 6 EG, the attendees of this session just wanted Java CanDI in. Its utility was apparent to them and they didn’t care about the political debate, they just want it in. Of course, that’s just what I heard…

Update: If you want the Java EE 6 spec committee to include Java CanDI (aka JCDI, aka JSR-299), let them know at jsr-316-comments@jcp.org

This week in Las Vegas, we’ll be at TheServerSide Java Symposium talking about Resin (including 4.0), Quercus, CanDI, Hessian, BAM, and everything else at Caucho. We’ll have a booth were you can chat with me, Theresa from sales, and Steve, our CEO. Steve will also be giving a lightning talk to showcase all the new technologies from Caucho on Wednesday. I’ll also do some blogging about the hot topics at the symposium in case you can’t make it, but I hope to see you there!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been preparing a whitepaper to explain the technical backing of Resin 4.0’s dynamic clustering support. We’re planning to have it available in printed form at this month’s TSSJS in Las Vegas, but you can download it now!

This blog is now 1 year old! A year ago today, we made the first blog post. Thanks to everyone who’s read, subscribed, and commented!

A quick update on what’s going on this week: the Resin team is working on the big changes for Resin 4.0 including the dynamic server support that offers distributed sessions, distributed object caching, and remote application deployment. The JavaEE 6 compliance work for Resin 4.0 is also under way, with the team focusing on EJB 3.1 Lite this week. The Quercus folks are working on improving the already awesome performance and reducing the memory footprint. Dynamic languages can be rough on the allocation system..

I’ve been finishing up a whitepaper on Resin 4.0 and all its new features that should provide an in-depth introduction to what Resin 4.0 does and how it does it. We’ll be distributing it at TSSJS next month in Las Vegas and on the website soon. I’m also working on Hessian Flash/Flex this week, bringing it up to speed with the latest Hessian 2 protocol fixes. In addition to the rigorous regression test that we run, I’m planning on writing an application in Flex for the next training course that should find any problems that show up in real use.