Jan 2017

What people expect to see at the conferences

As a public presenter, I always wonder what kind of presentation should I submit for tech conferences. Knowing what people want to hear about is always important to submit a good talk, and to give a good presentation once the talk is accepted by the conference. Here are some insights which I’ve collected from public feedback on conferences in 2016, and also a summary of my impressions and most common topics I’ve seen. (more…)

Sep 2016

The simplest way to define a singleton in Java correctly

A singleton pattern is probably the simplest well-known design pattern, but still people often implement it incorrectly in Java.

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Aug 2016

So, Oracle killed java.net

Well, not yet…but they announced to shutdown java.net and kenai by May 2017. I have been interviewed about this for an ADTmag article The ‘Sunsetting’ of Kenai and java.net by John K. Waters.

As Oracle provided little information to what will happen to critical projects that are already hosted on java.net, most of what was written in the article is still valid. Therefore I’m reposting my comments here again.

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Jul 2016

My recent talks at JUG in Prague

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Working at Payara

In June, I had a public presentation at a Java User Group in Prague. It was the first time I gave my new talk about building reactive applications with Java EE. And as a bonus, I wanted to introduce Payara project and how it relates to the GlassFish project. (more…)

May 2016

Payara update – May 2016

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Working at Payara

In March, I’ve started working for Payara and I’ve definitely enjoyed it since then. It’s been very refreshing. I really love all the new experience, including

the startup-like company culture (have a look at the courageous company web site)
being part of the Payara open-source project and community
helping customers directly instead of programming in an IT department several layers below
writing technical blogs and cooperating with our innovative marketing department
being the face of the Payara project and evangelist in Java EE community
and all this working remotely from home

I could write several posts about all this new experience. Hopefully another time. But now, I will just share the blog posts and screen casts about Payara Server features that I’ve authored and co-authored. (more…)

Apr 2016

Building a new productive team around Java EE 7

Anton Smutný is a software engineering manager at Muehlbauer Group, an international industrial company specializing in wide array of technologies. At the technology center located in Nitra, Slovakia, they are building a new agile Java team to fulfil growing internal needs for innovation and automation. Their team approached me to guide them in adopting new features and best practices in Java EE 7 effectively.

Anton, what were the reasons for choosing Java and Java EE, which alternatives did you consider?

This was not a question of creativity or technology. We knew that we have to build up the thin web based applications. We also wanted to avoid the necessity to build native mobile apps besides usual desktop applications. Why? It was a luxury for us. (more…)

Apr 2016

Started working as Payara engineer

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Working at Payara

Recently I made a small shift in my career, exchanging series of jobs and projects as a Java developer for a job to support and promote a great open-source product – Payara server. I made a leap from a developer who just enjoys the quality of lots of open-source software, to become a voice and face of one such product, for the community on github as well as for customers willing to pay for the support. I love that I may become active part of the Java and Java EE community, actively participate in shaping it, present new ideas and possibilities, and last but not least, help to modernize, support and shape the future of GlassFish server extended by the Payara server project. (more…)

Feb 2016

JPQL Enhancements in JPA 2.1 and Java EE 7 – JOIN ON

Java EE 7 is around for a few years already, and provides several very useful and long-awaited features, like entity graphs and better support for stored procedures and results mapping. For an overview, have a look at Thorben Janssen’s blog post. The query capabilities were also enhanced, with 3 additional keywords. All of them are available in both JPQL and Criteria API:

ON keyword to specify conditions for JOINs
FUNCTION to call arbitrary database function
TREAT to downcast entities to their specific type

In this post, I’ll focus on the first of them – the ON keyword in JOINs.

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Jan 2016

MVC 1.0 in Java EE 8: Getting started using facelets

MVC 1.0 is an action-based Model-View-Controller web framework, which will be a part of future Java EE 8. It will live side by side with component-based JSF framework and will provide an alternative for building HTML+javascript oriented applications with full control over URLs.

This post summarizes what needs to be done in order to use Facelets instead of default JSP as a view technology for MVC framework.

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