Monday, April 28, 2014

The Tom EE Tribe Time

You do not have to have any specific experience with Tom EE to become a fan. You do not even have to download it. You only have to talk or listen to David Blevins, a long time EE practitioner and the leader of TomiTribe, the real business around Tom EE, to feel excited and realize Tom EE is coming near you if not now but very soon.

We are the fans of TomEE+ of course :-).

You can become the member of the Tom EE(i) Tribe too, play with Tom EE and support the movement !


Sunday, April 27, 2014

Observations about Apache Con NA 2014

It has been a while since I visited Apache Con last time, so I was happy I got a chance to go to Apache Con NA 2014 held in Denver, nice 'mile high' city, April 7-9.

It may be quite a cliche thing to say but the most rewarding thing about visiting Apache Con is about socializing with the fellow team mates, committers and visitors, seeing people you have talked with over the years but not realizing how impressive they look like in the real life :-). The buzz coming out of the conversations or simply observing the activity is difficult to 'measure'.

Some key notes have been quite inspiring. It is obvious the open-source edge is there, still and will be there.

I've seen some interesting presentations, and I regret I was not able to see a number of them, which I was keen to see.

"SSL State of the Union" was brilliantly presented, the speaker managed to make it quite entertaining. I really liked it, the only problem was that it was presented after lunch, on the 2nd day, when the time difference body clock adjustment was still under way, so at the end of the presentation I started feeling a bit sleepy :-), and then I heard 'CXF' being mentioned, it re-energized me, especially given that CXF came up as the only Web Service implementation in the list where a specific HTTPs issue was confirmed to be resolved.

"Choosing an HTTP Proxy Server" was very professionally presented.

We've had several presentations about Apache CXF. Dan did a nice overview of what is coming in Apache CXF 3.0.0, Colm, the industry security expert, had two presentations about Apache CXF security, Denis Sosnowski was talking about WS RM.

You can also check the slides of my own presentation, "JAX-RS 2.0 With Apache CXF". I talked mainly about JAX-RS 2.0: about the new cool features, about the positive effect new spec leads have had on the progress of JAX-RS 2.0 and JAX-RS in particular.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the presentation made by Paul Wilson, a long time Apache CXF user. Paul came all the way to Denver to talk about the way they use Apache CXF in a big and successful project. It was a developer to developer talk, where people had a chance to listen and decide for themselves if the approach described worked for them or not. The room was full. I thought it was very nice of Paul to talk so much about CXF, given that obviously
their project is much bigger than just CXF. Paul was very gracious in recognizing the input Apache CXF community provided over the time to his queries, though I think it was mainly the other way around, him reporting the bugs and helping improving CXF.

I'd like to encourage CXF users who can afford talking publicly about some cool projects they have done with Apache CXF follow Paul's lead and talk and blog about it. Apache Con EU 2014 will be held in November in Budapest, great opportunity to do a submission :-)