First, let me start with a confession. Until last week I was a virgin. A JavaOne virgin of course ;-)

Where to start?

The booth

The JBoss / Red Hat booth really was the hub of the conference for me, and my colleagues. I spent more time at the booth than anywhere. Whether it was catching up community members, presenting in the mini-theater, chatting with people interested in JBoss technologies, or just gossiping with colleagues, it was always fun.

The mini-theater was a great crowd draw, and both my mini-theater talks caused the corridor to become impassable. All the mini-theater talks were recorded, and are just starting to appear online. I had a cloudy theme to mine, showing people how to use Red Hat's PaaS, OpenShift.

• Data Grids in the Cloud
• Java EE in the Cloud: JBoss AS 7 on OpenShift

I kept both talks very practical, focusing on how you can use OpenShift with Java EE, and Infinispan, and wove in some information about the technologies I was using. Take a look.

Parties

The parties were non-stop, and of course I have to mention the JBoss Party at Slide. But the definite highlight of the week for me was seeing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Sting. Mark, my boss, told me I was allowed to appreciate Oracle for a couple of hours during the concert, but afterwards I had to take a cold shower ;-) I better not say too much more, as I know there are some good photos of me on his camera!

Our final party of the week was perhaps the most impressive. Roof top terrace of one of the two JBoss Pad's watching the Blue Angels doing a fly-by.

Sessions

I managed to attend a few sessions, and enjoyed attending a couple around migrating from both Spring to Java EE. It's great to see the community really championing the cause of Java EE so enthusiastically. Makes those long hours Gavin, and many others, spent getting CDI off the ground seem very worth it.

My session was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - I talked about what's coming in CDI 1.1. I'm not a huge fan of this sort of session (I much prefer showing how you can build applications using the JBoss stack), but I knew the JavaOne audience would be interested in seeing the updates. The session, and many corridor discussions lead to an excellent panel session at the end of the week (with Arun in the chair, and David, Reza and Siva sitting alongside me on the panel). I learnt a lot about what you are looking for from CDI 1.1, and what your priorities are, invaluable information.

Interviews

I had the opportunity to talk to InfoQ, O'Reilly and TSS during the week about CDI and Java EE - all three were great fun to do. We covered the inevitable question How does this relate to Spring? a couple of times of course ;-) I'll post when the interviews are up! Thanks to Rick, Tim and Cameron, and their respective teams, for taking the time!

Thigh deep snow

Eh? What? Manik and I took a few days off after the conference to go hiking in the Sierra Nevada. There was somewhat more snow than we expected, and was pretty cold (night one, our boots froze), but a great way to unwind. Of course, I was sporting some pretty sexy well travelled head gear (it's been to 5500m above sea level and to 61 degrees north, that cap has).

Bring on next year!

I've just submitted an early draft of the Contexts and Dependency Injection 1.1 (CDI, JSR-346) to the JCP. We (the CDI community) have completed around a third of the features we want to see in CDI 1.1, so wanted to post an early draft to get some wider feedback. Whilst the JCP sort out the paperwork, you can read the draft on jboss.org :-)

So, what's been added since CDI 1.0?

• @Disposes methods for producer fields
• The CDI class, which provides programmatic access to CDI facilities from outside a managed bean
• Pass the qualifiers an event was fired with to the ObserverMethod
• Ability to veto beans declaratively using @Veto and @Requires
• Ability to access the BeanManager from the ServletContext
• Conversations in Servlet requests
• Application lifecycle events in Java EE
• Injection of Bean metadata into bean instances
• Programmatic access to a container provided Producer, InjectionTarget, AnnotatedType
• Ability to override attributes of a Bean via BeanAttributes
• Ability to process modules via ProcessModule
• Ability to wrap the InjectionPoint
• Ability to obtain Extension instances from BeanManager
• Injection of the ServletContext
• Access to beans.xml in ProcessModule
• Injection into enums
• Around 60 issues addressed

However, don't worry if your favorite new feature isn't listed - we're still planning to add:

• XML configuration
• Global ordering for interceptors, decorators and events
• Global enablement of interceptors, decorators and alternatives
• Multi-plexed contexts (multi-tennancy support)
• Service Handlers
• Split specification into core and Java EE integration
• Bootstrap support
• Java SE context definition
• Transaction scope

We're also tracking the development of other features such as:

• Declarative transactions for managed beans
• Async invocation and timers
• JMS / CDI integration

So, what do you think? You can comment on this blog, email the cdi-dev@lists.jboss.org list, or direct comments to me.

What do you like? What have we missed? What don't you like? The purpose of the EDR is to get your feedback - so please, get in touch!

Here are the slides[1] from my JavaOne talk on CDI 1.1 :-)

Kevin Pollet and I were interviewed by DZone about the CDI support in Infinispan - if you are interested in Infinispan, caching or data-grids, this should be interesting for you.

The CDI support is also a partial implementation of JSR-107 - the temporary caching API for Java that has recently reactivated and published a first draft for review . Greg's blog has more on using JSR-107.

If so, join me in a webinar next Wednesday where we'll explore you build elastic applications using CDI and Java EE 6. There will be a super cool demo :-D

• Date: Wednesday, October 5, 2011
• Time: 17:00 London, 12:00 Noon Boston, 9:00 San Francisco, 12:00 Midnight Singapore
• Registration
• More Info