JBoss World 2006

Sun was a premier sponsor of JBoss World 2006. This caught some folks by surprise. But if you think about it, it makes sense. JBoss has been an active member of the Java Community Process (JCP). The attendees at the conference are interested in enterprise Java software. Sun has tools and deployment solutions that would be of interest to those sorts of folks. So it is a natural fit.

And in fact, we had pretty good traffic in our booth. There were four demo stations setup. One each for the NetBeans IDE, Sun Java System Application Server (project Glassfish), Sun Composite Application Platform Suite, and the Sun Java Application Platform Suite.

I did demos of the NetBeans IDE along with Brian Leonard and Angela Caicedo. One of the great things about the attendees at this conference is that they already know about enterprise Java development. So it is not difficult to show them the advantages that the NetBeans IDE provides: wizards for creating all sorts of things (servlets, EJBs, filters, listeners, JSP pages, etc.), sample applications, an HTTP monitor, automatic creation and management of deployment descriptors, integrated support for the JBoss application server, etc. The ability to quickly create a basic CRUD (create, read, update, delete) application and deploy it to JBoss version 4.0.4 using NetBeans IDE version 5.5 got some attention - Brian has created an excellent description of it.

And of course, I went to some sessions. Thoughts on the most interesting ones are below.

Migration Experiences

This was done by Mark Smith of Valtech. He has been the chief architect on a project for over four years now that involved retraining 120 COBOL programmers and having them implement a large (1.5 million lines of code) enterprise system in Java. A key requirment is the ability to maintain state during transactions that involve communicating with fourteen unique external systems. They tried storing information in the session, then they tried stateful session EJBs, and finally entity EJBs. They ran into scalability and/or reliability problems with all three (at that time they were using an application server that was not from JBoss or Sun).

They eventually crafted their own solution, based in part on JBoss Cache. In the end, they created a framework that Mark described as "a poor man's version of Seam." One other comment he made that is worth noting: "With Seam, Gavin King is doing for Inversion of Control what he did for Object/Relational mapping with Hibernate."

SOA for Developers and Architects

This was a very informative and entertaining session done by Burr Sutter of JBoss. His intent was to strip away the hype from the world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and talk about what is really happening in the real world of enterprise systems. Some of his comments that stood out:

• Many of the systems described today as "SOA" by their implementors are not terribly sophisticated. There is a lot of passing of ASCII files around via FTP.
• The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is not so "simple" anymore.
• Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is not yet widely adopted. He referred to it as "WSDL with logic."
• The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) protocol is not yet widely adopted. Many system architects keep a spreadsheet with the URLs of the web services they need.
• The goal of implementing an SOA is not reuse. The goal is agility and alignment with business processes.
• REST is a very popular approach to doing web services, but discoverability and description of a specific service's APIs are an issue.

Development Tools

My favorite topic. :-) Max Rydahl Andersen of JBoss did a session on the tools that he has developed for Hibernate. He did an extensive demo and he spent some time talking about how "support for NetBeans is on the road map." Toward that end, he has recently added contributions from Leon Chiver and Petr Zajac to the cvs repository on hibernate.org. As Roumen has mentioned before, both plugins are currently available (here and here). For more information, check out this post from Max.

I attended a two-hour hands on lab on the JBoss Eclipse IDE. This was taught primarily by Marshall Culpepper, who is the development lead for the JBoss tools. Max was also there and did a brief demo of his Hibernate tools. Marshall stepped us through the process of registering an installation of JBoss 4.0.4 with Eclipse and then creating an EJB3 project. We used the tools to generate entity classes based on a database schema. Then we wrote a simple servlet to display a field from one of the entities.

It went okay, although there were some rough spots. The tools do not manage the deployment descriptors, so we had to do those by hand. Likewise with specifying the contents of the .jar, .war, and .ear files. We were using the current version (1.6.0) - I think they said some of these things might be improved in version 2.0.

After the lab ended I met with Marshall, Max, Koen Aers, and Shaun Connolly, the Vice President of Product Management for JBoss. We discussed some ideas for providing better support for developers who want to use the NetBeans IDE with JBoss software. So stay tuned.

Some Photos - Click for Full Size

	Marc Fleury gets a t-shirt
	Marc Fleury wears the t-shirt
	Heavy traffic at the Sun booth
	Brian doing a demo
	Angela doing a demo
	Demoing the NetBeans Profiler
	Happy recipient of the last t-shirt we had