TSE 2007 Wrapup
Keeping with my tradition of sparse and outdated blog postings, I present my thoughts on TSE 2007! For me, the following themes were prominent:
Spring is expanding the portfolio to cover more areas of enterprise development, in particular the integration and batch projects. Most of the press coverage (including blogs) covers the trendy Ajaxification of the web (and there was no shortage of this at TSE either); but the core of the enterprise is (still) integration and batch processing. The reception of these projects by attendees was positive and enthusiastic.
The trend of enterprise development is leaning away from generic monolithic J(2)EE application servers and towards more specialized solutions. This was addressed at both Rod Johnson’s keynote and the keynote delivered by John Rymer, Vice President at Forrester Research. This shift was made possible in large part by Spring and the infrastructure it provides (declarative AOP, TX management, etc.) A number of surveys were referenced which indicate high rates of Tomcat adoption in the enterprise. Deployments that require more than just a servlet container can easily take advantage of 3rd party add ons, such as the use of Coherence (and others) for clustering.
Speaking of clustering, attendees interested in clustering and scalability had a great selection of presentations to choose from. Hal Hildebrand of Oracle delivered a well attended talk on using Spring, OSGi and Coherence to develop the next generation application server. Billy Newport and Nati Shalom delivered presentations on IBM ObjectGrid and GigaSpaces, respectively. Yours truly discussed Oracle Coherence and methods for integrating the data grid with Spring and data sources. The data grid vendors participated in an extreme scalability BOF which included Rob Harrop and Wayne Lund. (Unfortunately Billy had to leave early and was not able to participate.)
Overall it was another great show; Jay Zimmerman and NFJS delivered, as always.
