JavaOne 2006 Java EE 5, Seam, the rise of NetBeans and more

15th May – NetBeans Day was held a day prior to the JavaOne show. The
response was great with the hall at the Argent hotel packed to
capacity. NetBeans has improved drastically over the past year or so
and that improvement was showing through the enthusiasm of the crowd
that had turned up.

It’s funny how software tool dev teams make the same mistakes that we
as individuals commit in our day to day lives. NetBeans had the early
advantage and was well established by the time Eclipse emerged. The
NetBeans team perhaps got complacent and soon NetBeans ended up being
completely eclipsed by the nicer, cleaner and faster Eclipse.

Something similar now seems to be happening with Eclipse. It apparently just wasn’t prepared for this big push from NetBeans. 2006 so far belongs to NetBeans. They now have a 5.5 version and lots of new useful features.

16th May 2006 – The initial keynote from Sun’s new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz highlighted Sun’s open approach and the message “Compatibility Matters”. JBoss has now joined NetBeans and Jonathan made it count by getting Marc Fleury to sport an “I Love NetBeans” t-shirt.

The big announcement was that Java EE 5 is now ready for production use. EJB 3.0 and annotations look like the most significant new features in Java EE 5. Sun has an annoying habit of constantly renaming products and versions. Saying Java EE 5 every time isn’t much fun even J3EE I think would have sounded better. Anyway as we can’t help it we just have to get used to taking the extra effort.

Floyd Marinescu, the creator of TheServerSide has launched a new community called InfoQ.com. The launch party at the Zebulon had some good music, but as I barely knew anyone at the party, people watching was my primary activity.

The overall turnout for the conference seems moderate. Moscone Center is nowhere as flooded as it was at Oracle OpenWorld last year. Yet the response looks decent. People are queuing up for sessions and any session with the word Ajax and EJB3 in the title is filling up days in advance.

17th May 2006 – I spent most of the day checking out the exhibit area. Every major company seems to be there. A couple of Indian companies like Pramati and Whizlabs also have there booths. Pramati seems to have faded over the past couple of years, so it was good to see their booth at JavaOne. The success of a booth greatly depends on its location and what’s the free stuff being given away.

I had a session on Groovy at the Oracle developer theater. The session I think went quite well although the turnout wasn’t that great.

I also attended a session on Seam by Gavin King. This was the first time I was attending a session by Gavin. He spent quite some time on JSF and EJB3 before he moved on to Seam. I am not sure I understood enough of Seam to comment on it, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on. As a speaker Gavin is quite a handful. A few days back I wrote a blog Java and the Emperor’s New Clothes, Gavin is more than capable of shouting that the emperor is naked, unless JBoss happens to be the weaver. He regularly attacked established notions of enterprise Java development in his own highly animated fashion.

Side Notes:
* JavaOne caterers have an uncanny knack of always running out of food about 30 min before scheduled close.
* The vegetarian food however is much better than any of my previous experiences.
* JavaOne is promoting the use of cycles and public transport, which I thought was a very good idea for the US where one person one car is more the rule than the exception
* Unlike at Oracle OpenWorld, the general sessions here are very well organized with big screens and proper seating for all.
* I had read news items while in India about how San Francisco is planning for free WiFi Internet access for all. It’s disappointing that nothing has changed on the ground, and my hotel still asks for a lot of money for Internet access. WiFi access at JavaOne is however free of cost.