TheServerSide Java Symposium – Day 1

Today I’m at the first day of the TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. There are about 400 attendees and a dozen or so companies exhibiting. I will try to post some notes about the talks as the day goes on…

• Keynote: The Productive Programmer: On the Lam from the Furniture Police – Neal Ford
• Enterprise Application Integration and Spring – Josh Long
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT): An Introduction – David Geary
• Sexier Software with Java and Flex – James Ward

Tags: flex, gwt, RIAs, spring, theserverside

Workflow Management: JBoss’s JBPM

The project I’m currently working on had a requirement for a workflow engine to manage the various process flow options for an order management system. For example, an order can be created, modified, submitted etc and we need to be able to persist and retrieve the process at any stage as we wait for human involvement to move to the next stage. I have been evaluating JBoss’s JBPM. It seems to meet our requirements but has been very difficult to get up and running. Overall it has been a frustrating process so far. The main JBoss JBPM site is at here and theServerSide has a good article on using it with Spring/Hibernate integration.

Tags: bpel, Hibernate, Java, jboss, jbpm, jpdl, spring, workflow

Spring talk from Rod Johnson

I attended a talk on Spring on Monday, given by the creator himself, Rod Johnson. He focused mainly on the new annotations features of Spring 2.5 which was interesting, but it was also good to hear an example of how Open Source Software funds itself. Basically SpringSource (of which Rod is CEO) as a company do the vast majority of the code contributions to Spring (and apparently to Tomcat as well), but get their revenue from things like their Enterprise level pay-for offerings such as their SpringSource Enterprise as well as support and training.

The talk was at the Google offices in Mountain View and co-hosted by the San Francisco Java User Group.

Tags: spring