As I already wrote, I am at the JAX in Wiesbaden this week. It is my first big Java conference and I am kinda excited.

My colleagues and I arrived in time and the day started right away with the Welcome-Speech from Sebastian Meyen. He told us about the how JAX started, the sessions today, trends, and the evening program (poker!). However, I waited for the keynote from Rod Johnson. Rod is the creator of the Spring Framework and currently involved in the JCP 316, JEE 6. He made no secret about how he feels for the JEE 5 stack and about the situation right now: EJB will be dead and JEE’s last hope is JEE 6 (all about what the user/programmer wants and simplicity). JEE 6 is formed around two slogans: Extensibility and Profiles. Extensibility means that it must be simpler to integrate frameworks in JEE and don’t be stucked to the shipped ones. This should help to get companies/developer involved and so create more competition in the JEE environment. Today it is all about IBM and Oracle/BEA in the JEE server market. Profiles help to get only what you want. Normally the full JEE stack is huge, but only a subset is needed. For JEE 6 three profiles are planned like light, medium, and all-you-can-eat.

The next two session I took were “Spring - from a Framework to an Ecosystem” and “GWT - the JSF we want?”. The Spring session was, despite the title, mostly about the newly released Spring Batch and Spring Integration. The speaker was Eberhard Wolff, a Spring guru working at Spring Source. The presentation was ok, but the content was not too interesting for me. The GWT session was about Google GWT. Since I already have some experience, I hoped for some advanced stuff and for solution to some common GWT problems, but the presentation covered some basic GWT and JEE, nothing new and sometimes it seemed that the slides were just taken from the official GWT site.

After lunch, which was really good, I attended four more sessions. Nope, I will write about them all, just about the interesting ones. One session was about Jazz. Jazz integrates typical and often heterogeneous products which are used to develop software, e.g. a version system like Subversion, Bug Tracking like BugZilla, …, and Jazz focuses on distributed teams. The approach Jazz is taking is really really interesting. Live metrics, collaboration, web interface or Eclipse interface (stay in the IDE), decision making, authorization, are provided from the framework. Jazz gets all the necessary data and functionality in communicating from existing products/infrastructures. For larger teams all this just sounds wonderful; I think it even brings additional value to smaller teams. Two more Pros are: teams are often distributed within the same building, so there is definitely a need for such a product and the creators of it are the Eclipse geniuses. Now the contras: its a product, nothing will be free, maybe some parts will be Open Source. It is a Rational product, therefore, the focus is, at least now, on Rational products.

Another interesting session was “Groovy for Java Projects”. The speaker was Dierk K