The flow of my JavaOne 2014 experience had each day getting progressively less demanding. Day zero was an eight hour class. Day one was booth duty, a session , EG meeting, and a BOF. By day two, Tuesday, my involvement had reduced to presenting one session, participating in the Hackergarten and meet the experts areas, and a panel discussion.

The day began by co-presenting a session with Heather VanCura, Mohamed Taman and Reza Rahman about the Adopt-a-JSR program. This session, CON6289: Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 7 and Java EE 8 was a lot of fun to prepare and present. We examined how the community has been involved with the JCP specifications that make up Java EE in the past few years, pointing to some sucessess and lessons learned. We looked at the topic from several perspectives. Heather presented the overview, Mohamed presented the Adoptor perspective, I presented the Adoptee perspective, and Reza presented the beneficiary perspective. With all these viewpoints on the problem, I think we had it covered pretty well. The slides have already been posted to the JavaOne content catalog.

As with yesterday's servlet session, we lead a parade from the conference room over to the Hilton, this time to the Hackergarten. The idea with the Hackergarten is to give attendees a zero-commitment opportunity to experiment with some new technology, in this case JCP specifications. As with Adopt-a-JSR, the Hackergarten is an opportunity for spec leads to leverage the excitement of the community to the benefit of their specification. I saw Anatole Tresch using the Hackergarten to advance the state of his Config JSR. During my time in the Hackergarten, I met with several people who were interested in Servlet and HTTP2, as well as meeting the JCP EC representive from ARM, who was very excited about recent developments in Java ME.

It was a short hop from the Hackergarten to the Meet the Java EE Experts table. While there, I had a nice conversation with Yara Senger (the heart of Java in Brazil), and a gentleman from the US Department of Education. He mentioned that ed.gov uses JSF for a large number of different siloed applications and were interested in using the Resource Library Contracts and Faces Flows features of JSF 2.2 to separate the appearance of an application from its behavior.

Rounding out the technical content of the day, was the late addition to the Java EE schedule of my colleague Manfred Riem. Manfred presented a BOF about MVC 1.0, one of only two brand new JSRs in Java EE 8. Manfred presenting MVC 1.0 Manfred has uploaded the slides to the JavaOne content catalog. My take on this JSR, and I'm going to get admitedly biased here, is that with the addition of MVC and the soon to be filed Security 1.0 JSR Java EE will really be a complete stack for enterprise software development on the Java platform. I think of security and MVC as the last two missing pieces in the Java EE puzzle.

My last session obligation of the day was participation in BOF3031 Meet the Java EE Specification Leads. This BOF was schedule challeged, with an 8pm start time. At the start of the session we had more people on stage (13 spec leads) than in the audience, but thankfully a few more people trickled in, tipping the balance in favor of the audience. Even with the light attendence, there was useful dialog, on topics such as security, database migration during development, and testability. I was happy to have the involvement of Emmanual Bernard and Antoine Sabot-Durand on the panel. Without non-Oracle vendors, there is no JCP, so RedHat is a very important partner.