More impressions of JavaOne 2009

Like my colleague Lucas I attended JavaOne 2009. This post will describe my impressions of JavaOne 2009. The event turned out to be a mix of great things. I attended loads of great sessions, I met many great people and I had an awesome time in San Francisco.

By the way, did you already hear of our upcoming session "Our JavaOne report" that we will hold on Tuesday, June 16 at Amis? For more info and how to register see this link.

Pardon me for that shameless plug. Please read on for the rest of the article

Great sessions

Most of the sessions I attended were about JEE 5 and JEE 6. The JEE 5 ones were about performance optimizing existing code. I attended a session about optimizing JPA which provided some great tips and tricks for optimizing the JPA layer of your app. I didn’t learn many new things there, which indicates that my knowledge about this topic is quite accurate. Another performance session I attended was about optimizing Ajax requests and page loads. This one turned out to be quite informative with a few very nice tips. Some of them are

– dereference JavaScript variables when you leave a page to free up memory
– break up variable calls like divs[i].style.color into separate variables. Apparently that’s a LOT faster!
– make fewer HTTP requests, e.g. by combining small images into one larger an and only display that image partly
– put stylesheets in the HEAD and JavaScript at the bootom of a page

Apart form these JEE 5 sessions I attended quite a few JEE 6 sessions. One session deeply dove into using EJB 3.1 Embeddable containers in JSE apps. The embeddalble EJB container will be part of the EJB 3.1 spec so it’s good to know about it.

Then there was a "Meet the JPA Expert Group session" which turned out to be very nice. Linda DeMichiels let the audience ask questions and when we ran out of them, she started asking questions at us! Anyone who’s sceptic about expert groups not listening to the community should have attended that session. I have never been sceptic about that, and the session has proved me right.

The sessions AMIS hosted

This year AMIS hosted no less than three sessions at JavaOne. Lucas presented about SaaS enabling JavaServer Faces applications. I got to present about FishCAT, the GlassFish Community Acceptance Test that I participate in, and about automatic integration testing web applications with Ant (or Maven), Selenium and TestNG. I didn’t attend Lucas’ session, but I got the impression that my sessions were received pretty well. Here’s an image of Lucas and I at JavaOne.

Meeting great people

JavaOne typically is a conference where all kinds of people can be found. There are simple developers and end users like myself, which are most of the people. But there also are many developers of well known frameworks, like Seam, IceFaces, HtmlUnit etc. Then there are the Expert Group members : the great minds that participate in the Java Community Process (JCP) and that create the specifications for JPA, EJB, JSF and the like.

Since I presented the session on FishCAT at CommunityOne on Monday, I got to meet many of the people behind GlassFish. First and foremost the GlassFish Quality Team members, lead by Judy Tang whom I did my session with. And Adam Bien, who’s got a great blog on JEE and who also participates in FishCAT, was there too. Here’s an image of Judy, Homer, Adam and myself.

Then I got to meet Doug Clarke, who’s technical lead of EclipseLink. On July 7 we will host a session on JPA 2.0 at AMIS and I talked to Doug about that session. Doug kindly made his slides available for us and suggested I talk to Mike Keith for exercises. I did but unfortunately Mike didn’t have any JPA 2.0 exercises ready yet. I promised I will send him our exercises which we’ll do

Awesome time

In summary, JavaOne 2009 was great. I learned a lot and met many great people. If you never have been to JavaOne, please consider doing so. Well, that is if there’s another JavaOne next year. With the Sun acquisition of Oracle, which Lucas wrote about, anything may be possible. In any case, hope to see you at JavaOne next year!