Develop@BEAWorld Barcelona Day Summary

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Jon Mountjoy's Blog | October 3, 2007   9:24 AM | Comments (0)

Develop@BEAWorld got off to a great start today with a keynote delivered by Rod Johnson. Rod covered a lot of ground. I enjoyed hearing about the future Java EE 6 and the old stovepipe J2EE architecture. In traditional J2EE (and Java EE 5)—the application server is this huge monolithic piece of infrastructure providing everything under the sun). As Rod puts it, the application server itself offers a set of services. Java EE 6 has features around extensibility and a concept of profiles, and we can now look at an application server as this collection of services. [ Perhaps we can then pick and choose the implementation. I imagine this will change the face of competition among Java EE 6 application server vendors too. ] Rod writes about this in his blog post: Java EE 6 Gets it Right.

Rod also spoke about how the old J2EE was not terribly object oriented because of the "excessive focus on distributed objects." [ Too true, and part of the reason why I love JPA and using Spring. They put the OO back in my apps... ] Rod illustrated this renaissance of true domain modeling with better O/R modeling and better understanding by pointing to two books: the old EJB Design Patterns and the new Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software [ Great book ].

Rod also covered OSGi, the various integration points between Spring Framework and WebLogic Server (and Event Server) and more.

I then listened to a talk on Open JPA and Spring, by Patrick Linskey. Patrick introduced JPA and OpenJPA (interestingly, a reasonably number of the audience said they're using Java EE 5), and how to use them from within Spring (for example, by using the wonderfully named LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean. Lots of code goodness.

Patrick also mentioned that they've just working on the next JPA spec release, so if you want to influence it, now is the time.

The next talk I attended was "Ajax Basics and Tools" by Gary Horen. (Unfortunately I missed Eddie's top rated "Basic Technologies and Approaches for Introducing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise"). After introducing Ajax, Gary then spoke about the different programming models: client-centric (application programmers write code that runs in the browser) and server-centric (application programmers write code that runs on the server (which may generate code to run on the client)). I was reminded of Gary's excellent article Exploring Ajax Runtime Offerings, which explores all of this in greater depth.

Gary demoed apps running Dojo and ICEfaces, and I saw (for the first time) Aptana running in his Workshop, allowing JavaScript debugging. Cool. Code completion too.

After running around looking for caffeine, I then attended "Lightweight WebLogic Server" by Jim Gish. Jim pointed out (and demoed) some possible future directions for WebLogic Server. Boy, some of this stuff is neat:

• Installation/download/startup/administration are all a lot faster in the next release. Net installers possibly coming, as well as installers that only install what you need (for example, just the core WLS not the WSRP Producer Support, or Beehive libraries etc.) This extends to runtime too, with optional startup of services to decrease memory footprint and startup times.
• Console is a lot faster and lighter, with a great new look and feel
• Advanced class reshaping. So, for example, you will be able to add/remove static methods and instance methods, adding/removing/changing static, abstract and instance method bodies, adding/removing fields/methods/constructors, etc. etc. in EJBs, servlets, etc. etc. Now this is cool. I wonder if it will get us to a point where developing in Java feels a bit like developing in Ruby (just hit refresh).

All in all, a great day of talks!

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