This year's JavaOne conference (September 30 - October 4, 2012) promises to be a great experience for everyone attending, whatever their background or interests. IBM is a Diamond sponsor of the event, and several members of the IBM team are providing a wide range of technical talks and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions to share their knowledge and experience. This article gives you a brief introduction to the IBM speakers and their sessions, along with time and location information. In Part 2, we'll summarize the sessions and provide access to the slides for a number of the presentations.

Sunday, September 30: Opening keynotes

If you're interested in IBM's vision for the future, don't miss the IBM keynote, entitled "(hardware,software) -> {IBM.java.patterns}." Two IBM Distinguished Engineers — Jason McGee, Chief Architect for a number of IBM cloud technologies (including IBM PureApplication System, IBM Workload Deployer, and WebSphere® Cloud Computing) and John Duimovich, IBM Chief Technology Officer for Java — will explain their vision for Java's future in the cloud and the innovations required in Java for it to support cloud workloads.

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Monday, October 1

Two great talks on Monday will share information about some innovations that IBM is already implementing for Java in the cloud. The first is "JVM Support for Multitenant Applications" by Graeme Johnson, IBM's Cloud JVM Architect. Johnson has been deeply involved in innovative JVM development for many years. In this talk, you'll hear how those years of experience have resulted in IBM taking a leading role in the development of multitenant JVM design. The second presentation is by Jason McGee, who'll follow up on his performance in Sunday's keynote by talking further about the cloud in "Deploying Java Applications on the IBM PureApplication System." This talk covers the IBM PureApplication System and how to use it to deploy both Java EE and non-JEE applications.

Taking a leading role in the future is never new to IBM. In addition to being forward-thinking, we also ensure that you can use today's Java technologies to their maximum potential. Phillip Koza will explain a variety of modern techniques and practises in his talk, "Efficient Memory and Thread Management in Highly Parallel Applications."

In the run-up to lunch, you can hear from Gerry Cuomo on "Engaging the Enterprise." Cuomo — the Chief Technology Officer for all of IBM WebSphere and an IBM Fellow — will be leveraging his experience working with enterprise organisations to talk about the future direction of the IBM WebSphere technologies and how those plans will help organisations to engage with their customers.

If you're looking to expand your knowledge of new subjects or learn how to exploit recent technology additions in Java, IBM has two other talks on Monday that should help. The first is from Neil Richards on "Resource Management in Java: Tips, Traps, and Techniques," in which he explains ways to manage Java resources using existing and new techniques. Richards' background as OpenJDK committer, IBM developer, and lead of the IBM ORB team makes him uniquely qualified to provide guidance on tackling resource management safely and easily.

The second talk is "What Is the Best Way to Embed Your Scripting Language in Java?" by Paul Thwaite. Thwaite leads IBM's Java SE Quality Assurance team, whose role — requiring a broad knowledge of the Java language and API — is to ensure that the Java SDKs that IBM provides are of the highest quality. In this talk, Thwaite outlines the options and choices available to you when you use scripting languages in a Java environment.

Paul Thwaite is also presenting a second talk on Monday in conjunction with Alexandre Iline from Oracle and Steve Poole from IBM. This is a BOF session called "OpenJDK: Java SDKs — Testing, Testing, Testing ...." The session reveals the extensive work IBM and Oracle undertake to ensure that customers receive high-quality Java SE SDKs, and how this effort is starting to make a transition into OpenJDK. Participation in this community-based talk on an interesting and perhaps unexpected topic is encouraged from anyone who wants to help make OpenJDK better.

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Tuesday, October 2

Tuesday's talks from IBM cover a broad range of subjects. The day starts by offering you with a hard choice between David Blevins excellent presentation on "Apache TomEE, a Java EE 6 Web Profile on Tomcat," Chris Bailey's intriguingly entitled "Rediscovering Your Architecture Through Software Archaeology," and Tim Ellison's "Real-World Compatibility and the Java Promise."

Blevins' talk is for Apache Tomcat enthusiasts. It will lead you through the concepts of TomEE and into the latest technology enhancements. Blevins is a founder of the Apache TomEE, OpenEJB, and Geronimo projects, and you're bound to learn a great deal from this session. If Tomcat is not your passion, you'll still have to make a choice between Ellison's revealing talk about the real challenges of delivering on the Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) promise and Chris Bailey's explanation of why you might just need to get out a spade or shovel when digging into legacy applications. Bailey is IBM's resident JavaOne Rock Star, while Tim's broad knowledge of Java is second to none. Tough choice.

After that challenge, you'll have time to relax until the afternoon, when Ryan Sciampacone and John Duimovich take on the two challenges of "High-Speed Networks: Free Performance or New Bottleneck?" and "Showdown at the JVM Corral." Sciampacone, the Architect for the IBM J9 JVM, will talk about the promise of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and some of the challenges involved in trying to combine Java with high-speed networks. John Duimovich and Oracle's Mikael Vidstedt will shoot it out over who has the best JVM. This is a perennial favourite session at JavaOne, and this year it's likely to be just as much fun as ever, with Duimovich and Vidstedt engaging on all topics to do with JVMs.

After the heat of the JVM battle is over, you can listen to another side of IBM as we talk about collaboration in OpenJDK and work in progress. The first session, "All Power to OpenJDK: Porting the JDK to PowerPC and AIX," will be presented jointly by Steve Poole from IBM and Volker Simonis from SAP. This talk covers how to start an OpenJDK porting project and just what you have to do to get the Hotspot JVM running on a new architecture. The last IBM session for the day is also a joint talk. In "OpenJDK and the Common VM Interface Project," Neil Richards and Steve Poole from IBM will talk with Andrew Hughes from Red Hat and Mikael Vidstedt from Oracle about the twilight zone between the JVM and the Java Class Libraries. Not a dry academic subject, the talk outlines why having a common interface is vital for the health of OpenJDK and the future of Java. All the speakers have different views, and this promises to be a entertaining talk to round out the IBM sessions on Tuesday.

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Wednesday, October 3

On Wednesday, the topics from the IBM team cover a number of challenges facing developers and applications, including memory efficiency, testing techniques, security, and running efficient batch processes. The day starts with Chris Bailey's "From Java Code to Java Heap: Understanding the Memory Usage of Your Application" talk, providing insight into how memory usage relates to the Java code being executed in an application.

Next, Paul Thwaite will cover the topic of bytecode instrumentation and how — rather than using it to add tracing or monitoring to applications — you can apply it to application testing. His session: "Innovative Testing Techniques with Bytecode Instrumentation," includes a practical example that shows how bytecode instrumentation has been used to test real applications.

After lunch, you have a choice of two IBM sessions. First, Ryan Sciampacone will talk about the issue of "Security in the Real World," a timely topic given the recent focus on security vulnerabilities in Java. In particular, his session will cover how Java provides security, some of the attack vectors that are used, and the challenges associated with fixing security issues quickly. Second, Sridhar Sudarsan will discuss "Java Batch for Cost-Optimized Business Efficiency." As the Chief Architect for Batch Processing at IBM and the creator of IBM WebSphere Compute Grid, he is a world-class expert on the subject; this session uses his vast experience to cover how to implement efficient batch-processing systems.

The last IBM session of the day will see Ian Robinson, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for the WebSphere Application Server, take part in a panel session on "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond" along with a number of his peers — all industry and open source luminaries from the world of Java EE. This should be a hugely interesting session covering the direction of enterprise Java and what to expect in the Java EE versions 7 and 8.

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Thursday, October 4

The IBM team will present its last session on Thursday. Chris Bailey will talk about a practical approach to performance tuning and optimization for an application deployment in "Practical Performance: Understand the Performance of Your Application." In this session, Bailey uses his more than 10 years of experience of troubleshooting issues in Java applications to provide a best-practices approach to carrying out performance measurements and analysis to identify bottlenecks in real applications.

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Competition and collaboration

The IBM team is presenting on a wide number of topics and technologies at JavaOne this year. Some of the sessions are panels — such as Tuesday's "Showdown at the JVM Corral" — that compare technologies from different vendors; others cover collaboration across the Java industry, particularly on OpenJDK and future standards.

In Part 2, we'll give you a summary of what happened and what was discussed in some of the panel and BOF sessions, and we'll provide access to some of the presentations themselves. In the meantime, we hope you have a great JavaOne 2012 experience.

Resources

Learn

• JavaOne 2012: Check out the conference site.
  
  
• IBM PureSystems: Find out more about IBM PureSystems.
  
  
• Apache TomEE: Visit the TomEE project on Apache.org.
  
  
• OpenJDK PowerPC/AIX Porting and OpenJDK Common VM Interface: Learn more about these OpenJDK projects.
  
  
• developerWorks Java technology zone: Find hundreds of articles about every aspect of Java programming.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Download IBM product evaluation versions or explore the online trials in the IBM SOA Sandbox and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere.
  
  

Discuss

• IBM Application Pattern for Java blog: Follow and provide feedback on the progress of the IBM Application Pattern for Java
  
  
• Check out developerWorks blogs and get involved in the developerWorks community.
  
  

About the authors

Chris Bailey is a member of the IBM Java Technology Center team at the Hursley Park Development Lab in the United Kingdom. As the technical architect for the IBM Java service and support organization, he is responsible for enabling users of the IBM SDK for Java to deliver successful application deployments. Chris is also involved in gathering and assessing new requirements, delivering new debugging capabilities and tools, making improvements in documentation, and improving the quality of the IBM SDK for Java.

Steve Poole has been a long-time IBM Java developer, leader, and evangelist, working on IBM Java SDKs and JVMs since Java was less than a year old. In the years since, he's had time to work on other things, including representing IBM on various JSRs, being spec lead for JSR 326, and a committer on Apache Kato. Steve is a seasoned speaker and regular presenter at JavaOne and other conferences on technical and software-engineering topics. Recently, he's been participating in OpenJDK. In his spare time he can be found cursing over an Xcode project or two.

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Table of contents

• Sunday, September 30: Opening keynotes
• Monday, October 1
• Tuesday, October 2
• Wednesday, October 3
• Thursday, October 4
• Competition and collaboration
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments

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