On Thursday, March 19, 2009 I presented a quick overview and roadmap of Metro, Jersey, GlassFish, OpenESB, OpenSSO at the Utah Java Users Group. Here are my notes from the meeting. And a link to my slides.

Normally they have 2 one hour presentations (I have presented twice in the past). This time they had 5 twenty minutes presentations followed by a panel composed of the presenters being asked questions from the audience.

Theme: State of the Java Union:

• Tom Valletta, principal engineer LDS church
  JSF
• Sean Sullivan, open-source developer from Oregon
  JSON
• Chris Hansen, overstock.com
  JDK 7
• Harold Carr, Architect - Project Metro
  Metro, Jersey, GlassFish, OpenESB, OpenSSO
• John Griffin, overstock.com (author of Hibernate Search in Action (Manning)
  Hibernate

Questions from panel session

• Can I get support for Metro on other containers?
  No - but you can buy GlassFish support and report bugs that way.
• Why did you do Metro when Axis already existed?
  Axis did not have WS-* nor did they have MS interoperability as #1 goal
  Also, Axis did/does not have great support for JAX-WS/JAXB. They have good support for ADB and other bindings, but not JAXB.
• What will happen to Metro, NetBeans, GlassFish, Solaris, etc., with IBM?
  No comment
• How can we do centralized policy management while waiting for us to ship upcoming Web Services Configuration Management?
  Use policy references to external policy. See: Managing Policies in the Metro Users Guide

Other observations

• Most people seem to be using Tomcat (particularly Overstock.com). See the poll at UJUG's site.
• RFE: Jersey seems to causes URI path information to be spread across many files instead of being centralized. It would be good to have a IDE support: give it a URI and have the IDE take you to the code responsible.
• Interest in Scala and some discussion of Clojure (which is my favorite JVM language, besides llava).
• Informal "raise your hands" polls show:
  • most people in room using JSF
  • 30% using NetBeans
  • 50% using Eclipse
  • 20% using IntelliJ (but they were the most enthusiastic)

The presentations and forum were followed by parallel breakout sessions:

• Java Certification, lead by Don Bogardus
• java.community.events, lead by Chris Hansen

At the end of the evening I went out to eat with Ian Robertson, Chris Hansen and one other fellow, all from overstock.com. During the conversation I learned that overstock is using Jamon, a typed template engine for Java for its web pages. This was developed in-house by Ian. Ian twice during the evening pointed out I should consider attending UJUG meetings more often, since I live in Utah. Good idea.

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