Java Comes to Live! 360 Orlando, Reza Rahman To Keynote

In March we announced that ADTmag is participating this year in the very popular Live! 360 conference, scheduled for December 5-9 at Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando. This multi-conference conference comprises Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live!, Office/SharePoint Live!, Modern Apps Live!, TechMentor and now AppDev Trends 2016. We don't have the exclamation point in our title, but we're as excited as if we did.

We're especially thrilled to announced our keynote speaker: Reza Rahman. As regular readers of this column know, Rahman has been one of the chief drivers behind the Java EE Guardians and an expanding effort to encourage Oracle to give enterprise Java the attention it deserves and to preserve the overall interests of the Java EE community.

I first spoke with Rahman shortly after he left his position as Java EE evangelist at Oracle in March. "Java EE is very much key to the overall server-side Java ecosystem, and maybe even the health of Java itself," he told me. "Without core investments from Oracle into Java EE, there's a very large part of the ecosystem that will be severely weakened."

A lot has happened since then: the Guardians published their charter, launched a public website, and published a petition aimed at Oracle executives. Google won its "fair use" argument against Oracle's charge that it infringed on a copyright of 37 Java APIs. Oracle shut down the java.net and kenai.com collaborative Web sites. And another effort to support enterprise Java, the MicroProfile.io project, got underway.

And between now and our show in December: JavaOne, during which Oracle has promised to provide "a very well-defined proposal for the next version of the Java EE specification."

Rahman's keynote, entitled "You Are the Future of Enterprise Java!" couldn't be more timely. (Notice that he got into the spirit of the conference with his own exclamation point!) And I can't think of a better speaker to present it.

Rahman has been working with enterprise Java since its inception, developing on almost every major application platform, from Tomcat to JBoss, GlassFish, WebSphere, and WebLogic. He implemented the EJB container for the Resin open source Java EE application server, and he has served as a member of the Java EE, EJB, and JMS expert groups of the Java Community Process (JCP). He also co-authored EJB 3 in Action (with Debu Panda and Derek Lane), and contributes to a number of industry publications. He's also a winner of the JavaOne Rock Star Speaker award.

"Java EE remains one of the most important technologies for global IT," Rahman said in an email. "It has come a long way since J2EE and has grown to become highly community-centric. Indeed, the process of defining the scope of Java EE 8 was the most community-opinion-driven process in the history of the platform. In fact, it was the community that helped to smooth the many bumps along the road to Java EE 8 for the entire IT industry."

Rahman's keynote will tell that unique story, focusing on what's inside Java EE 8 and how it got there, and exploring the critical role Java EE and APIs currently play in maintaining the health of the entire Java and IT ecosystem. And perhaps most importantly, he will attempt to answer the question, What do we need to do now to move enterprise Java forward?

Our goal was to tweak the ingredients of an already great conference with dash of Java and some sessions specifically aimed at ADTmag readers, and I think we've succeeded. This is a show you won't want to miss. Find out more here.

Posted by John K. Waters on September 14, 2016