Coming back from JBoss Two

Spent a whole day at JBoss conference, which was just across the street of JavaOne venue, it is my first time with jboss event but it’s no doubt to me that it is better than any Java sessions I have attended before in past years( just one exception, its Floyd Marinescu’s presentation about j2EE pattern two years back)

Though I am not good at articulating things but I do want to share some interesting things in this JBoss event with folks here.

Impression on Marc Fleury
“Flamboyant”. That’s what I heard about him, my first look at him reminded me about Hitler, actually there is no facial similarity between them but probably his semi skin head let me think of Nazi. But when he opened his month, his image became the God Father of Italian mafia, the tone he spoke, the gestures used, of course he was speaking English with little bit French accent. Don’t get me worry, he is very good, quite a techi and business savvy person. He gave the first speech on JBoss open source and cool stuffs in JBoss4.0, did a fantastic job to elaborate how AOP is done in Jboss4, he even claimed JBoss is on the side with .NET vs. other J2EE vendors on the other side in term of simplicity, quite a few time he acknowledge .NET for it useful/practical approaches on metadata and declarative nature and easy of use. ( This does not mean .NET is ahead of game, jdk1.5 tiger is on the way remotely, at present, JBoss is standing out )

Follow up his introduction is a show up of JBoss start team members, it’s nice to see them all, but I just don’t want to say too much here.

Then two JBoss partners went on to introduce their integrated products with JBoss, a distributed JMS product and a JMX based JBoss specific performance monitor, I actually missed the most of the second part, as I stayed outside to chat with the CTO Dave and chief architect Mark from that JMS vendor about distribution transaction implementation and webservice. Actually there is a story behind to get me into it this topic:
http://www.jdon.com/jive/thread.jsp?forum=121&thread=7427

Next speech is from CTO of Intellij, my favoriate IDE, he gave some inside info about IDEA4.0 and another product which in the category to compete with BEA workshop or WASD, maybe English is not his native language, sometime I feel hard to concentrate on what he said, but it did show good stuffs are piled up for next version. Such as AOP support.

To me, the customer panel session is just marketing campaign, about 7 customers share their experience of using Jboss(good) vs. other vendors( not that good of course). During the break, I did find a chance to speak with Marc in person to thank him and JBoss for providing such as wonderful product which I can used in my project.

The AOP panel, IMHO, was the most delighting session in the day, Bill, CTO of Jboss , a guy from IBM and a professor from Japan gave individual speech about their view about AOP and their idea about declaration of Aspect and implementation, sometime they don’t see eye to eye with each other, mixed with different voices from the audiences, the session was quickly turned into a debate forum, Marc was like hosting a talk show, quite entertaining actually.
AOP is still new, personally I am quite happy to use it in logging, XML parsing, and I have been thinking to implement security cross cut using aspectJ, but the extensiveness of using AOP really make me mouth wide open for a while: tracing, security, transactional, caching( clustered) and persistence etc, Bill gave a live demo and I am convinced.

The end session is about JBoss Group, a professional organization and it’s about how JBoss make money, I like their business model to leverage service to keep the company running and get core developed paid so they can work on full scale. This further valid my concern about pure open source: A legitimate/long term business has to be self sustainable; it can’t be free for everything. Customer also looking for paid service to get better support.

I have been thinking all the way home about the upcoming JBoss server, the concept of POJO( plain old java object, which is going to be popular in jboss community soon),AOP and clustering JMS/Caching, comparing those technologies with my own development suite Topas, though they are still vague, for sure there are lots of territories to be explored with what I have learned today. Today, I just stop here.

Cheers
-Jevang