Today was an interesting day at JavaOne. I first started meeting a giant Duke in the busy corridors of the Moscone Center

Then I met Aaron Houston (the Sun guy who helps the JUGs around the world) who gave the Paris JUG a Sun Spot . The idea is to use the spot in a collaborative way so the JUG can develop any kind of application with. Aaron, you are a champion ;o)

I went to a session that Gavin King gave on WebBeans. The concept of WebBeans looks interesting, it glues different kinds of components together in a loose way. The problem are the annotations. God, there’s annotations everywhere. It took me 5 years to get sick of verbose XML but I think it will be quicker with annotations. Then the JPA 2 presentation of Linda DeMichel. As part of the expert group I‘m attending all the Java EE presentations.

Then I left the busy Moscone Center to go to the quieter Intercontinental hotel next door. As I blogged earlier I’ve been asked by Patrick Curran to participate to a round table about opening up the JCP .

I shared the table with Stephen Colebourne, Michael Nascimento Santos, Alex Buckley, Kay Glahn, Rod Johnson and Dalibor Topic. In front of us a room of 30 people made of other JCP members, Expert Commitee members and the press. Patrick introduced us and gave us 5 minutes to talk on different topics and then Q&A. It was a very interesting and constructive exchange. Nobody was there to just criticize the JCP but more to try to help in opening it up to the world. Even if the JCP is made of 75% of individuals, it is still seen as a coorporate organization. As an individual, opening up means things like easier access to information, documentation (being able to update it), access to other JSRs (before they arrive at the early draft stage) or clarifying the JSPA (or even do not sign it). As Stephen mentioned, the JSPA was made so that cooperates that do not trust each other could work together. In the open source world you do not proceed like that.

I have to say that it looks like the JCP is in the process of changing. It looks promising.