OpenCloud tops share their JAIN SLEE experience (December 16, 2007)

My hosting company have been visited yesterday by two important people in JAIN SLEE world: OpenCloud’s Charlie Crighton and Dave Ferry. They made one-day workshop (wow, that was the first workshop with CTO in my life!) sharing their ideas and experience on building services and service frameworks in SLEE.

In two words: that was intense. When you meet people like them, you always got inspired by the energy which is spouting out of them. The overall result of the workshop is too wide to fit in one post, but I’ll try to summarize points which I consider to be the most important (and some of them were discussed during the coffee breaks!):

• SLEE specification is special in the Java world. The most commonly used parts of its nearest neighbour — the JEE specification — are JDBC and servlets, or around 20% of the specification volume, whereas JAIN SLEE specification are used by everyone almost in its entirety. A good sign of well thought-out framework. Because of that SLEE never needed anything like Spring, and there’s no such popular thing as stateless session bean in SLEE;
• SLEE profiles are by any means a great thing; I’ll dedicate a separate post to it later (UPDATE: done already);
• Generic service framework, which could be potentially developed using SLEE may take any form, e.g. it could be similar to Sun’s Collections API, to C++’s STL, or to Java Swing. Platform itself does not force any particular programming style;
• Service Building Blocks, or SBBs, being the ideal location for protocol state machines, along with SLEE infrastructure tying them together make SLEE-based application server an ideal candidate for working in IMS

Suming all this up: thank you guys and hope to see you again!