In his keynote at the forth annual Java2Days conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, Reza Rahman discussed the pending release of Java EE 7. This is the first Java EE release in over three years, and is expected to ship in early Q2, 2013 (although the Glassfish app server version 4 early access already includes many features from Java EE 7 and even some from Java EE 8.)
Java EE 7 originally intended to add cloud management tools, however most of the cloud support has been delayed until Java EE 8 as we reported in September. Some of the expected enhancements include:
- JPA 2.1 including schema generation, stored procedure support, unsynchronized persistence contexts, and entity converters
- Web Sockets
- JMS 2, the first update to JMS since version 1.1 was introduced in March 2002. This release makes JCA support mandatory, which will remove some of the platform dependency introduced by vendors
- Java Batch, a specification for declaring batch jobs using a common programming model and standard API's
- JAX-RS 2.0 adding client API's to RESTful Web Services as well as entity interceptors, async processing, hypermedia support, and common configuration
- EJB 3.2 continues the simplifications initiated in EJB 3.0, and removes more of the restrictions from earlier versions, allowing for example file system access
- JSON-P, which introduces XML-like STaX and DOM processing to JSON
- JSF 2.2 including HTML 5 support
- Bean Validation 1.1, a new anotation-based facility for declaring constraints on variables and parameters in a Java class
- New support for caching and transactions.
"Testing Multithreaded Applications" was an unusual session that enumerated some testing frameworks including MultithreadedTC co-authored by Bill Pugh of FindBugs fame, IMUnit, which is an event based testing framework, Java Path Finder, a framework for testing all possible interleavings for small thread counts, and other concurrency niche testing frameworks.
Another testing talk did a hands on dive of the popular Mockito Mock Objects testing framework.
Java Concurrent Animated has become a staple in these conferences and was entertaining as usual, now featuring new animations for all of the new Java 7 concurrency components.
Java2Days, the first Java conference held in Eastern Europe, takes place in the modern Inter Expo Convention Center in central Sofia, Bulgaria, which towers above the medieval Bulgarian churches and remnants of the pre-1989 communist politico structures. Presentations are conducted in English, and the conference is composed of three tracks - Java2Days, Cloud2Days, and Mobile2Days. This year there were almost 1000 attendees, representing a large growth since the show first opened in 2009. Other speakers included Adrian Cole and InfoQ contributor Josh Long.