Well, there will be some real Java news this week. Java EE 5 (Java Enterprise Edition, the successor to J2EE) will actually be released this week after its initial preview during JavaOne 2005. With Java EE 5 becoming ready for primetime, it’s time for the Standard Edition to get some attention. This week, Java SE 6 will be unveiled for its initial preview.
However, it’s not surprising that Web 2.0 is becoming a major theme. If last year was about the simplification of enterprise Java, it makes sense that this year’s attention go towards the client. And because Ajax is not platform specific, that provides plenty of rope for Java tool vendors to hop the bandwagon.
For all the attention being drawn to Ajax, the reality is that it wasn’t designed to handle complex apps that require processing of complex data sets, validation logic, or the meshing of business processes. So we’re not surprised that on our calendar, we’ll be meeting the presenter of a session going by the title, Stronger than AJAX: Swing in a Server-Side Web Architecture.
Another major theme last year was the explosion of open source, as providers like Sun used it as a means to introduce their appserver or ESB offerings to the masses, or in the cases of players like BEA or JBoss, to officially embrace open source J2EE alternative frameworks as part of their supported offerings.
Open source will therefore also be part of the agenda this week. Sun will open source what it calls the Operating Systems Distribution License for Java. This new license makes it easier for open source (read: Linux) platforms like Debian to ship the Java run time as part of their distributions.
Motorola will use open source as the vehicle to promote a more standardized implementation of Java in the mobile industry. Specifically, it will open source test profiles for the Mobile Information Device Profiles (MIDP) 3.0 specification that is pillar of the J2ME mobile Java platform.
But as for the bigger question, the open sourcing of Java itself, Sun gave us three words: Jonathan Schwartz keynote.
Finally, Sun will showcase interoperability demos that show how you can marry Rich Internet Applications employing a Java back end with web services or Ajax presentation tiers. That approach is consistent with the mantra that has become prevalent since the dawn of n-tier web apps to isolate the logic and data from the technology platform on which it’s implemented.
Last year, Microsoft played a guest role showing how you could use web services to get .NET and Java environments to talk to each other.
However, contended Lawrence Moroney, director for technology evangelism at Mainsoft and Marina Fisher, staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, coauthors of a new book on Java and .NET interoperability, there are serious limitations to approaches that try isolating the technology stacks.
The fact that there is a WS-I speaks volumes, said Moroney, meaning that its existence means that interoperability between different web service vendor stacks is hardly automatic.
He gives the example of taking a Microsoft DataSet, an element of the .NET framework which provides a nice way of managing a connection to the database and providing easy ways of connecting to results of database operations such as stored procedures.
But what happens if you want to display the results on a Java page? he asks. He contends that, because Java has no equivalent to the .NET DataSet function, you will have to write code to parse the XML.
