Session at JavaOne come in various shapes. Some are visionary, high level and future oriented. Others are detailed and discuss practical, sometimes very fine grained topics. One of the sessions I attended was somewhere in between: future oriented yet pretty concrete at the same time. It was probably my favorite session at JavaOne this year: What’s new in Servlet3.1: An Overview by  Shing Wai Cha and Rajiv Mordani. The passion of the presenters – their enthusiasm to explain the current development of the Servlet API and their ability to demonstrate some rather tough concepts were pivotal. Many presenters can take their style as an example they can learn from.

The Servlet 3.1 API is part of the JEE 7 edition- that is scheduled for complete release in April 2013. The Servlet Specification is largely complete, although some elements are still under discussion as became clear during this talk. The probably most important new requirement in Servlet 3.1 is the ability to do Web Socket interaction. Web Sockets is a relatively new communication protocol that runs over TCP/IP and goes beyond HTTP in several respects. Web Sockets support bi-directional interactions (open channels through More >