Tag: java

Christian Bauer has an update on the Hibernate blog about the status on the second edition of the Hibernate in Action book. Apparently there has been so much additional material added to the book that they’re changing the name to ‘Java Persistence with Hibernate’.

The new book will cover Hibernate 3.0 features in addition to Java Persistence API features (EJB3.0 Entities).

Can;t wait to get a copy of this one, as HiA in my opinion was and still is the best Hibernate book published.

Daniel Steinberg has an interesing account of the Key Notes from JavaOne this year – he mentions in his article that they were lacking the ‘rally the troups’ enthusiasm from prior years. Was it that they were missing the McNealy-style jokes with his always anticipated Microsoft bashing?

I ony got to attend one day this year on Wednesday, and I admit the keynotes were a little bland. The BEA afternoon session was more of a corporate invester conference call than typical conference Key Note material. I had to leave early to get a train, but from what I saw, there wasn’t anything that got me that excited.

I can see Stenberg’s point. The last JavaOne I attented was 2001, and after every Key Note you left feeling so pumped up about Java that you wanted to race out of the hall and start coding! There was definitely less of that enthusiasm this year.

However, the emphasis seemed to have shifted out to the sessions themselves – the sessions I attended did make me feel ‘wow – that was awesome!’ each time they completed, and I am definitely fired up about new technologies such as EJB3.0 and Groovy, even though I had already been working with both prior to the conference. There still is definitely something very refreshing and invigorating about attending tech conferences – you leave feeling energized and empowered with new technologies and skills – and then get back to the real project world and realise – ‘oh, we’re still using J2EE 1.3’ … 🙂

Now this is a neat idea – JavaPolis a European Java User Group conference has put together a DVD of all the sessions from their 2005 conference – more details on their website here.

java.sun.com has a roundup of the key messages from the Key Note presentations and the main action items for the community. Most of these revolve around rallying the troups to get involved with the Sun sponsored open source projects, for example Glassfish and Netbeans subprojects (Profile, Mobility, and Matisse).

OnJava.com also have an ‘Executive Summary’ on what was hot and not this year: What’t hot: AJAX, EE5.0 and EJB3.0, Mobile apps. What’s not: preregistration for session seats (personally I thought this was a neat idea, until I changed my mind a couple of times on what session I wanted to attend I found myself with the red ‘denied’ screen at the door, and was escorted to the overflow room where I was subjected to watching a streaming webcast of the session that kept cutting out every minute or so and you kept loosing 10 seconds of the presentation, so you never heard the presenter complete a sentence – now that was annoying), the Sun opensource annoucement, with no details of when, how and who is involved.

My own impressions this year (from only attending on Wednesday) – there was a noticable absence of Sun self-promoting technical sessions, which has been a major critisim from previous years (and I think one of the main reasons for the appearance of JavaOne alternative conferences, like No Fluff Just Stuff). The sessions I attended were all presented by individuals from other organizations and about technologies they were working with or on – I find this perspective more interesting than hearing self-promotion. My main critisim – the sessions I attended gave me a high level overview of some new feature, but I came away feeling I had to now go and do some reasearch on my own to get the real nitty-gritty inside info – the sessions didn’t go into details deep enough for me. Still, I did get to find out about some technologies (Groovy) I knew relatively little about, so I came away with some new skills and interest in new areas that I will be spending some time investigating further, so it was worthwhile for me.