~pperalta

The Quick Start with Acegi talk by Ben Alex was a beginner’s guide to Acegi. The focus was on the limitations of container managed security and how Acegi addresses them, including:

• Not portable at WAR level. Each container has vastly different methods of implementing security (Tomcat realms, JBoss LoginModules, etc.)
• Only web requests at the URL level can be secured; Acegi allows method level authorization
• No support for nice features such as “remember me”

One of the issues that I had with Acegi when I first started using it (version 0.7) was how verbose the configuration was. This is supposed to have improved recently, and it is supposed to be even better when it is integrated with Spring 2.0. I’m looking forward to the Acegi 1.0 release.

The remoting talk covered all sorts of remoting technology, such as RMI, IIOP, Hessian, Burlap, SOAP, and Spring’s HTTPInvoker. In general, the proxy based solutions that Spring provides for remoting makes it easy to choose the right remoting technology for your project.

Speaking of remoting, I had an interesting conversation with Mark Pollack regarding JMS remoting. A concept that he has worked on is to use JMS for interoperability with .NET and Java. His project maps object properties to nested map messages in JMS. Using a tool to convert Java to .NET, he generates the .NET version of the data objects and uses proxies to translate between the JMS messages and objects. That sounds like an interesting alternative to IIOP for interoperability.

The dinner time keynote by Rod Johnson announced BEA realtime server which is a new product by BEA targeted to customers that require very high performance for server side processing. This is meant for applications that have not moved off of C++ yet because GC pause time is not an option. The core of this BEA product is Spring, which is quite the validation of the performance that Spring can provide.

A partnership with Geronimo was also announced. I noticed that quite a few demos during the conference were using Geronimo. Rod also mentioned the TopLink DAO support that was donated by Oracle. A major theme with Spring is that it does not try to lock you into a specific vendor; in fact they strive to be as vendor neutral as possible in order to have wide acceptance.

Next Adrian Coyer gave a talk on AOP and its role in making Java simpler yet more powerful. You can throw a lot of money at software, but no amount of money will ensure high quality. The best chance at success is simplicity, but real world software is complex. Using the combination of dependency injection, aspects, and annotations/metadata, we can make software in a simple and modular way, yet allow for complex interactions at the same time. It is for this reason that aspects and AOP will be the next paradigm shift to follow after OOP. As Rod says, knowing and using AOP is a competitive advantage today, tomorrow it will be a competitive necessity.

This morning was Advanced Spring MVC with Rob Harrop, which consisted of a deep dive of Spring MVC form processing, controller testing, i18n, exception handling, and using multiple view technologies in the same project. The slides are very comprehensive and do a good job describing all of these features.