Adam Bien is back from CommunityOne East in NYC and his "Pragmatic Java EE development" session is already online along with a few others. There are no slides, just code. While Adam uses NetBeans and GlassFish, the session is not about using wizards that generate code in you back but rather standard, convention over configuration, Java EE 5 artifacts. This was apparently all done on a brand new laptop with very little time to setup the environment.

The pace of this presentation is good (I believe the "deploy-on-change" helps a bit here) and from the batch of questions received, I can certainly relate to how difficult it is to appeal to both people that take Java EE 5 for granted (and want to see EE 6 in action) and people seeing JAX-WS, EJB 3, and JPA for the first time.

GlassFish users probably take EJB 3, JPA, and dependency injection for granted but with others application servers reaching Java EE 5 compliance, Adam Bien's article on EJB 3 at JavaWorld is very timely. The article discusses how EJB 3 streamlines enterprise development and make them an appropriate technology for large but also small and midrange applications.

Adam states that "(EJB's) are in fact the only vendor-neutral and portable solution for enterprise server-side applications" and goes on to contrast EJB 3 with previous versions from a developer perspective. The article describes how lookups and factories are replaced with dependency injection, the POJO + annotation approach, but also covers the use of ejb-jar.xml as well as interceptors (described here as lightweight AOP).

The article concludes with EJB 3.1 upcoming enhancements such as easier packaging (WAR), no-interface views, singletons, etc... Make sure you try the EJB 3.1 preview available from the update center of GlassFish v3 "Prelude".