I failed to respect the obligation I made to myself to write at least one blog entry per day during this JavaONE 2007 conference. Main reasons are that, given a certain point into the conference, you’re going from general sessions to technical sessions to BOF’s. You’re meeting people, exchanging ideas and business cards, meeting experts and leaders from our community. In other words simple stuffs like eating, sleeping or … blogging are secondary. I hit that point yesterday 🙂
My day #3 was all about Glassfish, the open source Java application server contributed by Sun and the community. Version 2.0 is available as a beta (expect final release by end of calendar year). v2.0’s main focus are high availability and load balancing, features already available in Sun’s Application Server 7 and 8 (these are pre-Glassfish releases).
Glassfish v2.0 will be a enterprise-ready, open-source application server, allowing to provide for highly available deployments and being able to scale the load across several application server’s instances. Glassfish v2.0 also adds some features not previously available in previous versions of Sun’s application server (at least, not officially supported), like in memory replication of statefull information between application server’s instances. Statefull information includes HTTP sessions, statefull session beans and SSO session information. Surprisingly, this in memory replication in implemented on top of the JXTA framework. Yes, that JXTA, the open-source peer-to-peer technology, contributed by Sun. Here the peers are application server’s instances.
My day#4 was split between James Gosling tradition General Session showcasing fun and unexpected Java applications developed across the world. I have to admit I arrived a little bit late to this session and I missed the first half of it. Reason is that I ended yesterday night at that place called the Holy Cow. Great fun, many (too many ?) cocktails and a very short night 🙂
I then attended an excellent session hosted by Romain and Chet about creating nice looking GUI’s with Swing, Java2D and Java3D. This session was a kind of teaser for their forthcoming book : Filthy Rich Clients.
I closed this year’s JavaONE with a Verisign talk about OpenID. By the way, I failed to mention earlier that Sun announced last Monday that they will start an openID provider for the employees Every single employee will have a Sun-hosted OpenID. This will allow partner sites (like Safari, The Apple Store) to securely recognize a Sun employee, without necessary requiring to know who we really are.
As usual, pictures are posted to my Flickr account.