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JAXconf is coming to an end and it was a blast. We’ve seen awesome tutorials, talks and keynotes over the past four days. The conference came to a perfect ending with the keynote on Java EE 7 by Linda DeMichiel. She  is a Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Oracle and is specification lead for the Java EE 7 Platform (JSR-342). She is also currently specification lead for Java Persistence 2.1 (JSR-338).
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. PaaS and Multitenance may bring models like PaaS Platform on Demand, PaaS Multitenant Containers, SaaS Multitenant Applications or SaaS-limited. Furthermore, Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API, and plenty of improvements to all other components.
Linda gave us a great insight of the Oracle agenda for Java EE 7 and even Java EE 8. Opening keynote by Rod Johnson and closing keynote by Linda DeMichiel were dominated by the Cloud topic – think about it!

The Java EE 6 platform contains a wealth of APIs: some were just introduced (JAX-RS and Bean Validation); others have been around for a long time with little or no change (JMS); Because one must not forget: comparing EE6 to EE5 shows that over 50% haven’t changed at all, while about 11% are completely new.
So some APIs have a long history, but have also seen leaps in usability (EJBs). When writing an application, we often fall back on old habits. As a result, we overlook some new, often simpler, features that would let us solve the problem much faster. Pieter Humphrey, principal product director at Oracle, looked at the Java EE 6 programming model as a whole, dived into the different layers of a typical Java EE Web application and showed how to implement them using the latest Java EE features with WebLogic.
Pieter gave a great overview to Java EE 6 and its new features, interacting with the JAXconf audience.

Second keynote on Wednesday at JAXconf was presented by Ben Galbraith, together with his long-time friend Dion Almaer. He forms one-half of the dynamic “Ben and Dion” duo that founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now working on a new start-up called Set Direction.
With the recent releases of Firefox 4 and 5, we’re reminded that today’s browsers sport amazing capabilities, truly graduating from markup renderers to sophisticated app run-times. We’re sure to see some amazing new web applications just over the horizon that take advantage of these new capabilities. At the same time, the mobile ecosystem is white hot. What relationship do mobile “apps” have with the web and how will these two communities co-exist into the future? Also, how do developers target all of these different platforms? Ben and Dion shared their thoughts on these and other issues.
The Keynote was a great journey through the history of the web, as Ben and Dion compared the “old” web with the new one, showing screenshots of websites from Disney, Apple or Google and how they changed through the years.
The problem they see is: talented web developers moved to the mobile market to develop mobile apps and suddenly the apps looked awesome and the web stopped looking awesome in some way. Also there is a group of app start-ups that don’t want to move to the web at all.
The argument Ben and Dion brought up is: Don’t decide whether you want to do app OR web but combine it. Best example for Dion is Facebook, sharing the code of the newsstream for the website, the iPhone app as well as the Android app.

The first JAX on American ground has started. Today, on Tuesday 21st June, the JAX Conf was opened by Confrence Chair Sebastian Meyen in San Jose, California. The conference provides more than 90 sessions in seven parallel Tracks. And, like the European JAX Conferences, the JAXconf is fully dedicated to the Java Ecosystem.

Sebastian Meyen explained in his opening speech the idea of the Java ecosystem, and stressed that in Java there are many places where innovative responses to the technological challenges of the future are developed. To highlight the innovation of the Java ecosystem, and to promote innovative contributions, the JAX Innovation Award – which is already known in the European context – has been extended and embedded into the worldwide framework of JAXconf 2011. In the categories of “Most Innovative Java Technology,” “Most Innovative Java Company,” “Best Java Ambassador” and “Special Jury Award” four outstanding contributions to the Java ecosystem will be regognized by the Community and a panel of independent Java experts, and will be awarded a total of $ 10,000.

The opening keynote of JAXconf was presented by none other than Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring framework and Senior Vice President of Application Platform Division at VMware. The keynote speech titled “The Future of Java” had – how could it be otherwise? – Cloud Computing as the main topic.

But before Rod took the audience into the cloud, he made one thing clear: Java is not dead, but has a brilliant future ahead of it. Rod combined this with a quote from Mark Twain: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

But: The future of Java depends on how Java deals with the cloud challenge. Rod is convinced that cloud computing has arrived at a stage (by the way, in contrast to SOA) beyond the Buzzword Bingo. Cloud computing offers many challenges to the world of Enterprise Java which have to be mastered. Rod highlighted the currently available enterprise standards and their vulnerabilities.

Developers need to build applications that leverage a dynamic and changing infrastructure, access data in non-traditional storage formats, perfrm complex computations against large data sets, support access from a plethora of client platforms and do so more quickly than ever before without sacrificing scalability, reliability and performance.

The JAX 2011 Conference will continue until Thursday 23rd June. The conference follows the successful concept of the European JAX, where attendees can visit all sessions with their entry badge. Java EE, Spring, Java Language, Java & Tech Tools, JBoss, Java Mobile and Cloud Computing are among the main topics of the conference, as well as hot topics surrounding Java like agile lifecycle management, Webtech & JavaScript and Web architectures. Also taking place under the umbrella of the JAX conference, is this year’s JSF Summit JSF, which under the guidance of guru JSF Kito Mann, contributes about 20 presentations and 2 day workshops on the latest developments in JavaServer Faces.

On Twitter, the conference can be followed under the hash tag #jaxconf.

CloudBees today announced at JAXconf San Jose a new partner ecosystem that extends its PaaS platform to seamlessly support additional cloud services. Developers now have access to multiple hosted services and can manage application build, deployment, monitoring and data services from a single location in the cloud.
The new ecosystem launches with five initial partners: Cloudant, JFrog, New Relic, SonaSource and Sauce Labs. One of the partner services that add to CloudBees’ DEV@Cloud service is JFrog Artifactory Online. JFrog announced earlier today at JAXconf a new joint collaboration around an advanced artifact repository solution for Grails, in the form of the Grails Artifactory Online repository service. Partner services that add to CloudBees’ RUN@cloud service include Cloudant who offers an open source clustered CouchDB database in the cloud.

The Grails project and  JFrog today announced at JAXconf San Jose, a new joint collaboration around an advanced artifact repository solution for Grails, in the form of the Grails Artifactory Online repository service.

JFrog, makers of the Artifactory binary repository, has set up a new dedicated Artifactory Online instance for the Grails project. Artifactory Online, JFrog’s SaaS solution is a cloud based repository management on EC2. It will provide Grails with the full Artifactory Pro platform and features for hosting and delivering releases, plugins and other resources to the Grails community.

Graeme Rocher, Project Lead of Grails at SpringSource said : “Artifactory Online has significantly eased the Grails project’s dependency  and repository management challenges by unifying access to all of the remote repositories we depend on. Grails users stand to benefit significantly for this new architecture and we are extremely excited to be working with the JFrog team to deliver a scalable solution for dependency management to Grails users.”

Fred Simon, JFrog Chief Architect  said: “We are excited to have Grails aboard, together with Gradle, Groovy++ and other OSS projects that take advantage of a private cloud repository, and we look forward to serve the Grails community with a full-featured, powerful binary management and scalable distribution.”

Both JFrog and Grails are excited by this cooperation, and see it as a great opportunity for improving users’ experience and advancing open source technologies and projects.

Max Katz, Senior Systems Engineer and Lead RIA Strategist at Exadel, will present a RichFaces full day tutorial and a talk on RichFaces 4 at upcoming JAXconf San Jose. We talked to Max about the RichFaces 4 release, its influence on the JSF 2 standard and the future of this project.

JAXconf: RichFaces 4 was released earlier this year. In your ‘Ajax Applications with JSF 2 and New RichFaces 4′ JAXconf talk, you will cover RichFaces 4 and JSF2. What value does RichFaces 4 add on top of JSF2?

Max Katz: RichFaces adds everything you need to build real-world, rich, enterprise applications today. Let’s look at how RichFaces does this one part at a time. RichFaces Core provides a number of additional components for sending an Ajax request as well as request customization features, advanced rendering and execute options, and significant upgrades to the standard JSF client queue. RichFaces UI provides a large number of rich out-of-the-box components with features such as partial table updates, client-side validation, and a JavaScript API to interact with the component on the client side. RichFaces Skins makes it possible to change the look and feel of the entire application on-the-fly and also supports applying skins to standard JSF and HTML tags. Lastly, RichFaces CDK (Component Development Kit) makes it easy to build your own custom components.
Now, the fact that you need to use something like RichFaces to get the full benefit of JSF 2 is not a bad thing. The creators of JSF envisioned a vibrant and active community to provide extra components, features, and customization options for JSF, and that’s exactly what RichFaces does.

JAXconf: Several of the features from RichFaces 3 were incorporated in the JSF 2 standards. Do you see any potential for a similar thing happening with RichFaces 4?

Max Katz: Absolutely. For example, incorporating a lot of the functionality of the RichFaces 3 <ajax:support> component as the JSF 2 <f:ajax> component was a great addition to JSF 2. In RichFaces 4, there are a number of very important features that would be good candidates such as partial table updates, client-side validation, upgraded client queue, skins, and a number of advanced rendering options. Additional components that send an Ajax request would also be a good addition to the standard.

JAXconf: What new features can we expect in the upcoming RichFaces 4.1?

Max Katz: One of the main features being considered for RichFaces 4.1 is mobile and HTML 5 support. Other features that might be included are integration with the SeamForge project and some new UI components. The best way to find what’s coming up is to visit RichFaces home page.
Also, a number of components from RichFaces 3 didn’t make it into version 4. Some of them didn’t make it because they were to hard to use and needed to be revamped. So, the RichFaces team will revamp these components to make them easier to use and then fold them back into RichFaces.

Max Katz is a Senior Systems Engineer and Lead RIA Strategist at Exadel. Max is a well-known speaker appearing at many conferences, webinars, and JUGs. Max leads Exadel’s RIA and mobile strategy and Exadel open source projects suc as Fiji, Flamingo and JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse. Max is the community manager for web-based rapid UI prototyping application Tiggr, http://gotiggr.com. He has been involved with RichFaces since its inception, publishing numerous articles, providing consulting and training, and authoring the book “Practical RichFaces” (Apress). Max writes about RIA technologies in his blog, http://mkblog.exadel.com , and can be found on Twitter as @maxkatz. Max holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of California, Davis and MBA from Golden Gate University.