This is a recap of sessions attended at JBoss World 2006, held recently:

Tuesday June 13, 2006

Session: JBoss Seam

The open source lightweight JBoss Seam, a Java EE 5 standards-based framework, is now mature in a consistent project integrating the best of several worlds: EJB3, JSF and jBPM. The modularity of Seam lets you use the pieces you want, you can use and mix the pieces you want, trade EJB3 for Hibernate for example. You can also use the sophisticated jBPM pageflow mechanism for some part of the website while using the simple nevagiation-rules system of JSF for some other parts. Seam is also essentially Web 2 (Ajax) compliant. Look for more integration with JBoss Portals, JBoss AOP (Aspect Orienced Programming) tool/library, business intelligence and reporting, and maybe a Rich Client Platform component down the road. This was what was shown in a demo and talk, presented by Gavin King, Seam project founder and lead.

Session: Introduction to JBoss Rules 3.0

Held by Mark Proctor of JBoss, this presentation provided a basic introduction into what JBoss Rules 3.0 is and the features that it provides. If you’re new to this, JBoss Rules was formerly the open source Drools project. Business Rules is an increasingly important consideration for every developer’s toolbox.

Wednesday June 14, 2006

Session: JBoss Portal 2.4: Diablo

Roy Russo & Julien Viet of JBoss, Inc. held this session. This presentation described current technologies relating to JBoss Portal, and some of the new features included in version 2.4 (Diablo). They covered the following: - An overview of the JBoss Portal architecture. - An overview of the WSRP additions in this release. - Enhancements to the JCR-enabled CMS employing JBoss BPM. - Roadmap items planned for future releases. - General community involvement topics.

Session: Java EE 5

This session by Sun’s Java EE 5 platform lead Bill Shannon provided an overview of the latest release of the enterprise Java platform, Java EE 5, focusing on its exciting new ease of development and web services features, and concluding with a hint of possibilities for future Java EE releases.

Session: Leveraging the Power of JBoss Portal with JBoss jBPM

Munwar Shariff, CTO and Kavitha Gondi, Program Manager, Cignex covered JBoss jBPM integration which provides much value-added business automation feature to the JBoss Portal. It gives the power of workflow to the Portal. jBPM portlet provides task management services to the users based on roles / permissions to take part in and/or manage business process. If jBPM portlet is integrated with CMS portlet, then the approval and publishing rights of content can be controlled through a pre-set criteria. Effectively implemented workflow offers a variety of benefits to an organization including reduced operating costs, improved productivity and services, and better conditions for employees.

Thursday June 15, 2006

Session: JBoss ESB

According to presenter Mark Little, JBoss, Inc., JBoss ESB is an Enterprise Service Bus offering from JBoss that builds on the proven technology of the JEMS components. It differs from other ESB offerings in that it is a SOA infrastructure first and foremost, designed with SOA principles inside the product architecture as well as outside. As we saw in this presentation, developing SOA applications using JBoss ESB enables better future proofing and ensures that JBoss ESB does not become part of the legacy problem.

Session: JBoss Transaction Service

In these series of presentations we looked at the new JBoss Transaction Service and all of the capabilities it offers. We also saw the JEE compliant implementations (JTA and JTS) within JBoss TS as well as the revolutionary Web Services transactions implementation, which has demonstrated interoperability with IBM and Microsoft.

Session: Porting a Standard Java EE / EJB3 Application to the Seam Framework

In this session, Sun’s Brian Leonard demonstrated the simplicity offered by Seam by converting a standard Java EE 5 EJB3.0 application to one which uses the Seam framework. We started with an introduction to Java EE 5 and EJB 3.0, covering new concepts such as annotations, dependency injection, persistence units and entity managers. We then used the NetBeans support for EJB 3.0 to build session beans, persistent entities and configured a persistence unit. Then, we created a view to those beans via a JSF managed bean. Then, we refactored the application to use the Seam framework, eliminating the need for our managed beans and accessed our EJBs directly from the JSP.

Links to these session presentations and more will be provided when available.