I just returned from TheServerSide Java Symposium Conference in Las Vegas, it was a really great conference! Here I will try to summarize some of messages I perceived there but if want to get deeper more complete coverage, I can't do better than one of the presenters there, Matt Raible. So go to his blog for his take, transcripts of the keynotes, and everything Raible: http://raibledesigns.com/

The slideshows from the breakout sessions are posted by TheServerSide.com here: http://www.slideshare.net/javasymposium - really *REALLY* good stuff in some of those.

Gosling gave the main keynote and he recommended some sites I totally had not previously paid attention to that are very interesting:

Open source version of java itself with stuff about hacking it and just all sorts of stuff.

Open source J2EE 6 stuff which includes Glassfish, WebBeans, JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0 and needless to say lots more. Lots of stuff came together all at once on Dec. 10th 2009 regarding java 6 such as Glassfish (the open source Enterprise server which implements the Java EE 6 platform) and Netbeans (the open source IDE that provides complete support for Java EE 6 and Glassfish).

The Java Developer Warehouse - sorta iTunes for java apps.

Several Presenters mentioned various technologies that caught my attention: NoSql, BigTable, infinispan, REST-MQ, REST-TX, Speed Tracer, JRebel, javax.script.package, map/reduce. Not necessarily new to me but it made me realize all the glorious architectural alternatives.

Map/Reduce was mentioned extensively - keep in mind the conference was called "ServerSide" - and is available in flavors other than the original Google invention such as one from Amazon.

The conference had numerous presentations either about ESB or referencing ESB which successfully introduced that technology to my radar.

The Flex-GWT smackdown was really great - things I learned there:

• gwt does REST flex doesn't
• flex can't do iphone, Android, PalmPre, etc
• flex has no right to left language support
• flex has issues printing from the browser

Google Wave seems to be standard among bleeding edge types.

The breakout about "Hidden Web Services" was very interesting: about the W3C RDFa vs Microformats.

And lastly (for this post) I discovered that HTML5 wasn't unusable or incompatible - just look at existing websites and examine their doctype - all the majors are already using HTML5.

That's all I have notes about - my main note was to be certain to rewatch all the slideshows including the ones I missed.

owen