This morning I attended Gaurav Gupta's JPA Modeler session, the tool is certainly very impressive and I wanted to learn more about it.
After Gaurav's session, I headed to the Franciscan C/D room to prepare for my own Hands-On Lab, "Java EE, Beyond the Basics". I had some materials (slides, manual, code samples, etc) to copy to the virtual machine's on the laptops and Murphy reared his ugly head. The lab's virtual machines were not booting. I googled the error and learned that as a workaround I had to disable USB on the VMs. With the help of a couple of technicians, we disabled USB on each and every virtual. But I had the files I needed to copy on a thumb drive, how could I copy them with USB disabled? Luckily, I had the files online, therefore we were able to download them and copy them to each and every VM. By the way, all class materials can be downloaded here. Luckily we were able to finish on time, by the time the students showed up the VM's were ready to go.
The session went very well, I covered JSF and EJB, my co-speaker Bob Larsen covered CDI. We were planning to cover JAX-RS as well, but unfortunately we ran out of time. I got some good feedback from the students both face to face and over Twitter, I think the session was well received.
After my session, I attended Linda DeMichiel's session on Java EE 8 Update. Linda, for those that don't know her, is one of the specification leads for the Java EE platform. She covered current plans for Java EE 8, currently scheduled to ship sometime in 2017. A controversial proposal is to drop the MVC API from Java EE 7, as well as JMS 2.1 (JMS 2.0, the current version, would be delivered with Java EE instead).
I then attended "Enterprise Java for the Cloud" by Rajiv Mordani, Josh Dorr and Dhiraj Mutreja. This session was about what is planned for Java EE 9. Againn lots of speculation here, as everything is in early planning stages. One thing that I found interesting is the addition of a standard Java EE API for NoSQL databases, at this moment it is not clear if it will be a completely new API or an enhancement to JPA.
The next session I attended was on JSON-B, the new Java API for JSON Binding. This is a new API scheduled to be included with Java EE 7, this new API will populate Java objects from JSON strings, and vice-versa.
I then skipped the JCP party to attend the "Java EE for the Cloud" Birds of a feather (BOF) session. This BOF session was surprisingly well attended, it started at 7:00 pm, usually night sessions are not that well attended, they compete with parties and with tired, jet-lagged attendees, looks like many people, like myself, care deeply about the future of Java EE. There were very good questions in this session, for example, there is a new security API proposed for Java EE 7, one of the attendees asked about integrating applications using the existing security APIs with the new proposed Java EE 8 API. In this session the comment was made that, although speculation at this time, it is possible that Java EE 9 will do away with the concept of application servers, in favor of Java 9 modules.
There are lots of sessions on Java EE 8 and Java EE 9 during the conference, I will do my best to attend as many as I can, to try and pick the brains of the individuals working on the new specifications for these future Java EE versions.
