Javapolis 1/5

OK I admit, probably way late to write something about Javapolis which I attended last week. But well, since then I had so much new things to discover that I decided that it's better to be burried under work than to appear alive :).
I'll split this up in seperate days so you don't have to read it as one big chunk.

But first a picture...



If you're looking for me (for some strange and obscene reason) I'm way off to the right and probably fell of the picture.

Ok first day, since it was university one 2 speakers a day, which made it kinda interesting as when you made your pick it was for half a day. My choices the first day were Apache MyFaces and Using the EJB 3.0 Reference Implementation. Although I have to admit that I was tempted to go to Desktop Java In Action by Romain Guy from Sun Microsystems. But since I'm a frequent reader of his blog, I thought go for something you know less about.

• MyFaces by Jonas Jacobi,Martin Marinschek and John Fallows: I've been using JSF to do the SCEA assignment last year and I found it a bit limited and full of quircks. But since a year has passed and things tend to change I wanted to see how things hopefully improved. Event though I didn't see any actual improvements (but more on that later), the announcement & demo (and actually rest of the talk) was made by Oracle that was going to open source it's ADF component suite.
  I've been looking to this and found it quite impressive but I've avoided it like the plague since I didn't want to be locked in. But now...
  This announcement was made in the MyFaces talk because of its future name MyFaces Cherokee although I haven't been able to find it on the incubator site of apache, it should be there next year (2006).
  


• 
  Using the EJB3.0 RI seemed to appeal to me as Sun finally understood that developers don't just take anything (like the M$ guys from technet sometimes seems to think) although when you look at JSF...
  Anyway, when you look at EJB3 the JSR members really seem to have done their homework. Finally no more blunted XML files (that everyone created through XDoclet anyway), simple POJO's, even the cmp's. Ahhh, what a relief to see that the most common options are now defaulted in the annotations (yes, java5 is required). Anyway the talk was really good filled with lot's of examples. Mike Keith really explained the persistence part very well. Things like the difference between EntityManagers and persistence contexts and how you can do queries now in EJB3. (Dynamic and static ones). As soon as can get my hands on this one, more of this