[Event] First day on W-JAX

Today, was the first day of the main conference at the W-JAX.

It started with an excellent keynote holding by Tim Bray, one of the most important people in the Java Community. His presentation focus on the future of the Java platform. Beginning with the essential step of Java into the Open Source community. Thereby he lists the main advantages coming with the community integration. He also mentioned, that in few years are many different implementations on Java will be available. But each implementation going public must accomplish the requirements given by Sun, to ensure that programs based on Java are portable on different runtimes.

In near future, Java is not the only dominant language running on a JVM. Tim provides a chart where Java, Phyton, Groovy and many more, are placed on the language sector. The new script languages do not replace Java, but provides interesting enhancements. Focused on Ruby, he shows the popular short video of Ruby On Rails, where a simple blog protoype is developed in a very short time. I come to the conclusion, that Java is further the most important language in the Web sector and languages like PHP and Ruby provide interesting concepts for Java.

The second keynote concentrated on SOA governance. This keynote clarified again, that SOA is a long-term project. Operate on SOA governance implies to know the organisation. It is important to communicate between the different departments in an organisation. Hit questions of SOA governance are:

• Artifact Use
• What is the impoact of a service change
• Are services operated according to policies and metrics
• SOA lifecycle

The SOA governance also concentrates on defining metrics, e.g. complexity of services, development efficiency. The main message of this session was, that SOA Governance bridging the gap between business and IT.

As AJAX is big hype, I attend the session about AJAX frameworks. This session gives an overview on current ajax frameworks both open source and commercial. Rico, DWR or Google Web Tookkit are current frameworks in the open source sector. Each presented framework was associated to a defined AJAX layer (snippets, widgets, client-side engine and Ajax framework). Also major advantages and disadvantages of each framework were discussed.

The second session about BPEL schon einsetzbar ("BPEL ready for primetime") focused on the technical perspective, where the speakers presented current BPEL engines, including Active BPEL, BEA AquaLogic or Oracle BPEL. Ending with a live demo by implementing a little demo process using the Oracle BPEL designer the conculsion is, that BPEL is an additional layer in an architecture, which reduces the performance. Therefore it is necessary to plan the service orchestration carefully and keep in mind, that BPEL is not suitable for every use case (e.g. transfer large data).

Current application are already designed with architectural pattern, like factories, proxies or adapters. But many applications missing an important aspect: Security. Bruce Sams, presented interesting security patterns which enable software developers to develop secure applications. At present there is no official pattern catalog for security patterns. Bruce presented first approaches:

• Audit Interceptor pattern
• Secure Transfer Object pattern
• Secure Logger pattern
• Authentication enforcer pattern
• Secure Service proxy pattern

He pointed to use a layered approach to securing applications. Layers are based whether data is:

1. in transit
2. in process
3. at rest

The last session gives me an insight view of the popular Spring framework. Jürgen Höller gave an overview on Spring and how the framework is managed.

On this occasion we want to mention again our event on Nov 23. where Jürgen Höller is also present as a speaker and will talk about Spring and Java persistence strategies.