A quick recap of today’s classes at JavaOne.

EJB 3.0

So EJB. It’s the complete enterprise solution. It’s web. It’s database. It’s mail. It slices. It dices. It’s everything you always wanted as a child but couldn’t have. Also, Sun apparently thinks the current version of it sucks.

Well, maybe that’s a little strong. They don’t like the version 2.x API. Nobody likes the API. It’s overly complex, requiring mounts and mounds of code and XML to get simple things done. Cleaning this up was one of the major points of EJB 3.

With version 3, you can pretty spell out plain old classes and interfaces, throw an annotation or two on various classes or methods and everything Just Works. Pretty appealing stuff. Apparently going from class to web service is an annotation away, which is braggable.

Other than that, though, it was a really high-level talk. Oh well.

Distributed Caching

Remember the presentation on caching that Flickr gave? Take that, replace all the memcached and apache stuff with hand-wavy “Java” and you’ve got this presentation. If you’re unfamiliar with caching at any level, maybe there’s something to be gained from this talk. Eh.

RESTful web services with JAX-WS

This was pretty cool. It was nothing that you couldn’t get on your own with the internet and a couple of hours, but it’s useful sometimes to have somebody else wade through the legion web services libraries, pick one out and explain it to you. It seems that JAX-WS can do everything I’d want from such a library. It works on the client and server ends of things, supports both SOAP and REST (the presented was an unabashed REST believer), works in J2EE containers as well as servlet containers, etc etc etc. A useful overview for useful stuff.