JA-SIG Conference

The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) seeks to provide education and research in the applied use of open technology architectures and systems in higher education. They had a conference here in Austin so I decided to check it out.

An excellent keynote address from Matt Thompson kicked things off. He described some of the things that are changing at Sun and how those affect the Java community in general and JA-SIG users in particular. The recent announcement about all of Sun's software being free got quite a bit of attention. He quoted from Jonathan Schwartz's blog; my own favorite entry on the topic is this one.

Matt then described several different projects, including NetBeans, Project Peabody, and Glassfish. Project Peabody is an initiative to provide a more collaborative development environment for future generations of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). The GlassFish community is building a free, open source application server which implements the newest features in the Java EE 5 platform (the next version of the J2EE platform), so it is the open sourcing of Sun's reference implementation EE 5 application server. (As an aside: If you happen to be in Austin next Tuesday night (December 13th) you can hear Sridhar Reddy discuss both Project Peabody and Glassfish in more detail at the December Austin Java User's Group meeting; check out the meeting page for more information (and note that Dave Havrda is also on the agenda, discussing the cool new plug-in creation features in version 5 of the NetBeans IDE). If instead of Austin, you're in Antwerp next week for Javapolis, be sure to check out NetBeans in Action where you can see Ludo Champenois's demonstration of using NetBeans with Glassfish to create applications that use the new features in EE 5.)

Back to the keynote: there were about 150 folks on hand and they seemed to get something out of it - I noticed several writing down notes, in particular when URLs were displayed.

During the keynote Matt had put in a couple of plugs for my thirty minute demo of the NetBeans IDE, which happened right after the keynote ended. I think I had around fifteen or so folks gathered around a small table - I did not have time to take an exact count. Thirty minutes is not much time to show off features in the NetBeans IDE, so everything went by in a blur. I started with a very quick general tour and then showed the most recent editor enhancements. After that Charlie Hunt (who was in Chicago) helped me show off the collaboration features. That left me with only ten more minutes. I had to choose: Project Matisse or the NetBeans Profiler. Since JA-SIG's big open source project is uPortal (which is a web application), I decided to go with the Profiler. For those of you interested in Project Matisse, be sure to check out this new interview with Tomas Pavek and Scott Violet. I got so wound up in showing the low-overhead profiling features that time ran out on me before I could pass out any schwag! I did manage to give tee-shirts and USB drives to a couple of guys from the University of Illinois.

After that I attended a couple of sessions. The first was by Jim Helwig of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The title was "Jumping In: Migrating an Enterprise System from Commercial Software to Open Source." To provide an analogy, he used the story of the Ingalls family, made popular in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books. It might sound a bit hoky, but it actually worked pretty well. He described how moving from a commerical portal product to uPortal involved lots of risks, unknowns, and sometimes hardships - just like being a pioneer in the 19th century. The second session was "A Holistic View of Identity Management" by Stuart Sim of Sun. Stuart has worked with companies from a variety of industries (financial, telecommunications, etc.) and feels very strongly that the most complicated set of identity definitions are in educational environments. He described additional challenges and briefly covered Sun's Identity Management products.

After that it was time for a quick lunch with Stuart and two of his colleagues from Sun's Education Division: Art Pasquinelli and Vinnie Gupta. The four of us then held an informal question and answer session open to all topics. There were more queries about how all of Sun's software is available for free. Stuart fielded a couple of questions about specific Identity Management architectural choices, and I answered some general Java and development tools questions. And since I had a captive audience, I got to hand out the rest of my schwag. :-)