JavaOne Day Three

I'll keep this pretty short for now, since the Wi-Fi is definitely not holding up as well today as it did earlier in the week!

I went to two sessions this morning. The first was on Web Beans. Gavin King did a great job explaining the ideas and the possibilities created by Web Beans. Bob Lee added some bits on some of the things in Guice that will make it into Web Beans. You can tell things are at an early stage, and it's hard to know if Web Beans will just be a superset of Seam and Guice. From my perspective, Seam is more powerful, but Guice is more elegant. Two interesting questions in the Q&A. First, somebody asked about involvement by the Spring guys on Web Beans. Bob Lee says they have been invited to the expert group, but so far no interest. There's a lot you can imply about that, enough for another post some other time. Next, somebody asked about the compatibility between Web Beans and the component model for the Service Component Architecture JSR. Gavin King balked at this, as seemed to think the whole notion of Service Component was a contradiction of terms. He said he couldn't say much more without being extremely negative.

Next session was Effective Java Reloaded by the venerable Joshua Bloch. First surprising thing was that Bloch is the "Chief Java Architect" at Google. And I thought they didn't have titles at Google and everybody was a software engineer! His talk was great. He had some really cool things with generics in particular. He talked about the SuperType Tokens that I had fist read about in Bob Lee's blog last year. It was a very useful talk. The only disappointing part is that he told us that book by the same title (the sequel to his successful Effective Java) won't be ready until the end of the year. I don't buy too many Java books anymore, but that's definitely one I will buy.