The JBoss Spring integration project (Snowdrop) seemed a bit too simple to me. After all I have used JBoss with Spring and to be honest it didn’t seem so complex to me as to deserve a whole session. Maybe it was useful for other people. For me it felt a bit like a marketing session (“look we support Spring too”). But I’m a cynic so maybe I’m just perceiving it wrong.

I liked the presentation on the new JSR-299 which is called Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI). I my opinion the talk was a bit too focused on the DI part. I’m really into the topic of context and state management lately which is a topic which is still feels like an unsolved problem around web frameworks (Of course: full-stack-frameworks like Tapestry, JSR-299 or  Wicket offer proprietary solutions but then you have to buy into the whole framework which might be good but might also be a showstopper). It also seems we have just replaced XML with annotations. All the new frameworks are very annotation-heavy. It will be interesting to see how this plays out when you combine all the solutions together. I doubt the code will be very readable. But Pete Muir did an excellent job with presenting it.

The migration from WebLogic to Tomcat by Joel Tosi spoke to my heart. Joel explained how the usage of the application server WebLogic at the CME lead to a huge complexity problem and how they solved it by basically stripping their platform down to the bare minimum (from a full blown JEE-stack down to Servlets and Persistence). It think complexity is a major problem with today’s solution. Often simplistic examples are used to sell new technology but if the application grows bigger it’s not clear how frameworks or programming models will scale up.

To sum it up: I enjoyed the conference a lot. It learned a whole lot of stuff and sometimes felt like the dumbest person in the room (I still don’t know how ESBs or BPM works exactly – it remains a mystery to me). The new technologies look good but I think a more humble approach would suit them better. After all EJB2 was praised as a great solution so we should be a bit more careful. Maybe we’re always falling for the same pattern. Simplistic examples are good to explain a new technology but sometimes it would be interesting to present the big picture and show how it plays out in real applications.