Scott Leberknight's Weblog

I am sitting in Oakland Airport waiting for my plane back home, so I thought I'd actually write a quick summary about JavaOne which I just attended this past week. I went to the 2003 and 2004 editions of JavaOne, and after that had decided not to come back as the quality of technical content was very low, especially compared to boutique conferences like No Fluff Just Stuff where almost every speaker is a book author, a well-known industry expert, an author of some popular open-source framework, or just is an excellent speaker and expert in their topic. But one of my friends went in 2005 (he was lucky enough to get a free ticket) and said that Sun had done a lot to improve the technical content and speaker quality; mostly it seemed they started inviting No Fluff speakers and other industry experts. So this year, after looking at the session descriptions and seeing a bunch of No Fluff speakers, people like Rod Johnson, Josh Bloch, and Neal Gafter, I decided to give it a try again. There's certainly no question JavaOne is always a good time with good parties, lots of food, lots of drinking, and is really a vacation!

Overall the conference was pretty good, and the speakers were in general very good. Then again, I did attend mostly sessions given by speakers I already knew were good and avoided the vendor-driven talks on EJB 3, JSF, and other such things that I never plan to actually use in a real project. I only attended the conference opening General Session on Tuesday morning, and found it to be quite anemic. Even the announcement that Sun planned to open source Java was subdued and not really much of an announcement - in fact most people sort of looked around and seemed to be asking "Did they just say they were going to open source Java?" since the way they announced it was so, well, lame. Much of the conference centered around the "Compatibility Matters" theme and the ubiquitous "Ease of Use" mantra, also known as "Ode to Visual Basic Programmers."

It continues to amaze me that the people doing the EJB 3 specification don't really seem to have learned much from Spring and Hibernate. Oh, they say they have a POJO-based programming model, inversion of control, dependency injection, and AOP, but in reality they are very limited and basic and don't approach the power that Spring provides, for example. There are annotations all over the place, which do remove a lot of the need for mounds of XML configuration code, but the "POJOs" are now littered with EJB imports, since you need to import the annotations you plan to use. So if you import the EJB annotations, are the POJOs really POJOs? Adding the @Stateless annotation to get yourself a stateless session bean still ties you to an EJB container. In Spring you are not tied to anything, and you generally don't have framework or vendor-specific imports in your classes, and most definitely not in your interfaces. And because the new JPA (Java Persistence API) does not include a "Criteria" API nor any notion of a second-level cache a la Hibernate, why in the world would I choose it over Hibernate 3?

I did attend some pretty interesting "non-standard" talks on things like JRuby, grid computing, TestNG, and Spring. I say "non-standard" because they are not the typical vendor-driven talks and are about topics that are not "standard" Java EE. It is refreshing that Sun has finally allowed these types of talks and has realized that not all Java developers are using the "standard" Java EE technologies as found in the specifications. Other interesting talks included one about new JVM features designed to permit dynamically typed languages like Ruby and Python to run on the JVM; and the new scripting language features built into Java SE 6. Initially I thought the addition of scripting support directly in the Java SE was a little silly, but after going to several talks I now at least see some potential benefits to it and think it might actually be a Good Thing - only time will tell I suppose.

Overall I think I got my money's worth, and that even included an appearance at the "After Dark Bash" from the Mythbusters who shot some t-shirts at extremely high velocities across the Moscone Center! Assuming Sun keeps bringing back the good speakers and keeps permitting the "non-standard" topics, I just might keep going back!