I hear the saying "JavaONE is only good for socializing" over and over again. This is exactly *not* my experience. You get the unique opportunity to talk to Sun engineers and get your questions answered. During the last JavaONE I had some nice and informative conversations with the core HotSpot, Glassfish, openSSO, and Java FX team. I had to sacrifice the After Dark for that purpose - but it was really worth.

BOFs are especially valuable for deep technical conversations and get your questions answered. But even the Glassfish Unconference and CommunityOne were interesting. I got some Hadoop, Google App Engine, Hudson, IceFaces, JavaFX and openSSO questions answered - directly from the committers. It saved me probably days, if not weeks, of research.

From my perspective JavaONE is absolutely worthless for socializing - it is too much interesting stuff going on :-). I try every year to spend more time at the pavilion, but I couldn't manage that. This was also the reason, why I scheduled my podcast at the very last - it was hard to find other free slots.

I actually only used the breakfast for socializing - few minutes a day :-). Lunch was already problematic - there were some interesting, technical sessions during the lunch as well.

This year I even didn't used my notebook during the sessions (except some general sessions) and entirely concentrated on the content and asked questions - this really paid off. JavaONE from my perspective is 12h / day technical content with 1% opportunity to spend time on parties :-). You need vacations after that event for sure - and probably some time for socializing :-). 

Some of my favorite features, as unordered list: 

•  openEJB embeddable container. It is easy to test EJB 3 outside the container. The overhead is minimal. You only need few additional lines of code: 
  Properties props = new Properties();
  props.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, "org.apache.openejb.client.LocalInitialContextFactory");
  Context context = new InitialContext(props);
  Hello hello = (Hello) context.lookup("HelloBeanLocal");
  The embeddable container is very fast. The initialization with the execution of a simple test takes 0.8s on my machine. Its fairly easy to use. I downloaded and installed the server, Netbeans RC1 and wrote the sample app in about 20 minutes. The container comes, however, with several JARs, which is a bit inconvenient to use. A single JAR would be more compelling. [Btw. this feature isn't new, but I really like it]
• JBoss comes with interesting transactional service for RESTFul services. The transaction service is able to coordinate XA transactions and is implemented in RESTFul way itself. I had to chance to discuss the implementation with the architect - its nicely designed. The RESTFul TX service is less interesting for XA and even more for the design of local, idempotent transactions. The service is available in SVN only.
• Glassfish v3 will come with RESTFul administration capabilities. You will be able to administer your server and domain via HTTP. This makes the administration and monitoring scriptable and available for tools like RightScale. You could even build a "mini cloud" (aka CloudFish :-)), with this technology and create, start or shutdown new instances on demand. The engineer promised me to make the functionality available before his vacations - let see :-)

At sunday I participated at the Glassfish Unconference (1PM-7PM), It was an unique opportunity to deep dive into opensso, cometd, reverse ajax, embeddable EJB container, OSGI support, Eclipse tooling, discuss performance, authentication and authorization with JAX-RS and Java FX,  REST / JSON, JAXB, metro and JAX-WS, IceFacaces, and even RichFaces architecture with committers, experts spec leads, and Glassfish engineers. I not only really enjoyed it, but also learned a lot.

After the conference there was an (un)party in ThirstyBear, the only difference was the increase of the (technical) talk intensity.

 Btw. I tried to enroll in my own session, but it is full:

Room: Esplanade 301

But if you are interested, feel free to contact me during the conference. We can start a hall-conversation :-)

Trains are great, but planes are even better for efficient development or just efficient work - just no distractions, except drinks and food. I took the first time several batteries with me to JavaONE 2007 - I had to complete some work. Last year, I did similar experiment and prepared not only slides, but hacked several proof of concepts. 

During the flight to New York City (Community East), I wrote two articles, one sample app and discussed with a (building) architect patterns and differences to software architects - it was also fun. 

This year I plan to enjoy the whole flight and completed the slides for Community West and even the java.net corner before the flight. I will use the time to hack Java FX app (GreenFire FX) during the flight. The skeleton does already exists - I plan to demo the app it during my JavaONE session.

I was invited to the "BOF-1721 Meet the GlassFish™ Server Team" Thursday, June 04, 8:30 PM - 9:20 PM - I'm just an independent freelancer and not a part of the team - but thanks for the invitation! So now my Java ONE is really active, 1 Java ONE session, one Glassfish BOF, 1 Community West and a java.net.podcast.

My CommunityOne session is now scheduled:

 ID#: S303893 

Room: Esplanade 301

I will try to objectively explain, why I almost exclusively used Glassfish v2 in my Java EE projects. I will try to repeat the Community EAST style - few slides lots of demos and walk-throughs. 

At Thursday, at 12:00 AM I will give a podcast in java.net CommunityCorner: 

 Title: Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices 

Abstract:

The complexity and bloat often associated with Java EE are largely due to the inherent complexity of distributed computing; otherwise, the platform is surprisingly simple. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1 actually consists of annotated classes and interfaces that are even leaner than classic POJOs; it would be hard to find anything more to simplify. Nonetheless, (mis)use of Java EE can lead to bloated and overstated architectures. I would like to discuss the essential ingredients of a lean service-oriented architecture (SOA), then explain how to implement one in Java EE without compromising maintainability. I'll start by describing aspects of SOA implementation that lend themselves to procedural programming, then discuss domain-driven (aka object-oriented) design. The patterns and best practices will be explained with Java EE Patterns vs. some J2EE anti-patterns. The discussion is based on https://p4j5.dev.java.net/. 

My JavaONE GreenFire FX was approved as well - really looking forward to this conference. Glassfish Unconference will be interesting as well...

Unlike my commercial projects, there is no NDA for GreenFire - its opensource. So I can deep dive into the implementation, talk about ideas and patterns. My JavaONE session was finally scheduled for:

ID#: TS-3890
Title: Energy, CO2 Savings with Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition and More: Project GreenFire
Date: 04-JUN-09
Time: 09:30 AM-10:30 AM
Venue: Moscone
Room: Esplanade 305 

I plan to talk about the following topics:

* Use of JSR 223 (Scripting Integration) in the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) environment for implementing flexible rule systems with Groovy
• Using Enterprise JavaBeans™ 3 (EJB™ 3) technology-based timer service
• Java EE technology-compatible hardware integration
• Using JavaFX™ technology with Swing and EJB 3 technology
• Sensor testing (with JUnit and mocking)
• Management and monitoring of heating systems over REST

I will disect the Java EE / Java FX code as well to explain some best practices and patterns. Beyond that - GreenFire really saves energy :-)

My CommunityOne session with the title: "2 Years of Glassfish in Development And Production - …and still excited?" was accepted. I'd like to discuss the following topics, its the origin abstract:  

"This session introduces Glassfish v2/v3 from the view of an
independent Java EE developer. Especially capabilities like:
- Monitoring of Java EE 5 applications
- Hot Deployment
- Effective development of Java EE 5
- Documentation and access to resources
- Configuration
- IDE integration
- Upgrades, Classpath settings
- Migration from other application servers
-  The use of JMS, EJB, JPA, JCA
Also useful information for daily work with glassfish, as well as testability,
performance scalability etc. are highlighted during this talk. Not only
features, but challenges are discussed during this session. The theory is
explained with many live demos."

I'm thinking about to show more demos and hack something on stage again (like at CommunityOne East), instead of presenting hundreds of slides. But I'm "agile" in this case - so what do you think about this? Constructive suggestions are very welcome.

GreenFire runs since about 3 years in background silently - and I almost forgot about it.  It was my first Java EE / EJB 3 "proof of concept" (more details), which went unchanged to "production". It regulates and tunes the heating - so it is a real mission critical project :-). My JavaONE session about the architecture of GreenFire was accepted - and I'm in the process now to write a small JavaFX widget, which communicates with the EJB 3 backend over REST - just for fun. I will present it during my J1 session.  GreenFire won 4th price at the European Innovation Award, and I was interviewed by JavaLobby and Ericsson - people seem to like the synergy between embedded, Java EE and real hardware :-). See you at JavaONE!. I'm on the road to CommunityONE now - I plan to show some synergies between Glassfish and Netbeans hacking some applications on stage in real time. So see you at CommunityOne (New York), JavaOne (San Francisco) or JAX (Frankfurt).

My session "Energy, CO2 Savings with Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition and More: Project GreenFire" was accepted. So looking forward to JavaONE and San Francisco :-).