Oracle OpenWorld Day 1 – Xtreme weekend – EJB3 and Annotations

Considering Oracle’s recent acquisitions and Oracle’s growing presence in the Java world, this year’s Openworld has a strange combination of events and sessions. The organizers would have had a tough job balancing content on Oracle Fusion Middleware and the Oracle Database with sessions for those coming from the Peoplesoft and JD Edwards world.

Xtreme weekend sessions day 1 had just 1/2 a day of content and a movie screening later in the evening. I spent a fair amount of time in the EJB3.0 session. The new JDeveloper preview does have some good EJB 3 tools and what I particularly liked was that unlike while developing EJB2.1 applications, with EJB3, apps are not cluttered with XML files. This brings up the question of whether Java annotations are better than using XML deployment descriptors.

I haven’t used annotations enough to give an opinion on this but I do find it funny that the same arguments that were given in favor of XML are now being given in favor of annotations. Creating XML files for your app was considered the wise thing to do only a short while back, but now it is being termed tedious to use XML. Using annotaions is suggested as the cool and smart thing to do.

Annotations not only involves fresh learning but once annotations start filling up code files, I guess developers might have a rethink. The basic idea behind annnotaitons looks good and the reduction in files is certainly welcome.

Sunday has a lot more action at Openworld with sessions throughout the day. However Monday to Thursday is the real thing, when one expects 1000s of people to come to Openworld. The exhibitor/booth list not only has well known Oracle vendors but even Indian vendor companies like TCS and Infosys. I look forward to checking out these booths.

Related:
>> Java developers don’t want Java annotations?

Reference:
>> Oracle OpenWorld 2005 (San Francisco)