Luis-Miguel Alventosa's Blog

Friday March 24, 2006

Java Expo '06 @ Sun Tech Days Madrid

I´m just back from the Sun Tech Days in Madrid (Spain). It´s been a great event, 1500+ attendees and very interesting technical talks around Java, NetBeans, Solaris and the latest and greatest web technologies (AJAX, SOA, ...). It´s been a real pleasure taking part in this event and see "live" the tremendous work Sun Technology Evangelists carry out and the dedication they put in evangelising Sun products and technologies through a series of technical talks, code camps and hands-on labs.

I also had the pleasure to personally meet Sun Distinguished Engineer Eduardo Pelegrí Llopart and attend his keynote around Java EE 5, GlassFish and the important role the developer community plays in it. Cool stuff! Keep the great work and you developers don´t forget to check The Aquarium on a daily basis.

Finally, I will say a few words about my JMX talk. I did present JMX and how it will evolve in Java SE 6 (Mustang) and Java SE 7 (Dolphin) and did demo the JMX NetBeans plugin and JConsole. Attendees were delighted by the JConsole tool and how easy it is to monitor and manage running Java apps with it. Got a bunch of interesting questions:

• Interest on the web services connector (JSR 262) and JAX-WS 2.0. Developers liked the idea of being able to deploy web services in the Java SE platform through the Mustang´s embedded HTTP server without having to embed themselves a third-party web container.
• Interest on discovery. How JMX agents can be discovered by generic JMX management consoles? I talked about the Lookup Services bindings defined in the JMX specification but maybe need to think again about a unified service provider based high-level Discovery API for JMX.
• Interest on mib2mbean (aka mibgen) and I would add mof2mbean too. Should we open source these tools? In my opinion these two are good candidates for evolution as two new java.net projects.
• Of course, we should not forget that JMX is still being used by products running on JDK 1.4.x and should continue to support the unbundled versions of the JMX and JMX Remote APIs for a while.
• Interest on JConsole´s tab extensibility. From Mustang b81 onwards developers will be able to reuse JConsole´s infrastructure and plug in their own custom tabs through the new JConsole Service API (aka as JConsole Plugin API).