Concurrency is all the rage due to the prevelance of multi-core computers these days.  One of the most attended sessions at this last JavaOne was on the use of the JDK 5.0 Concurrency utilities.  It is a shame that the team working on Serialization within the JDK never heard of this.  They have created a system that is only effective when used in a single threaded environment.  There is a static shared cache that is synchronized for all accesses!  This means effectively that no two threads can perform serialization at any time.  So much for using serialization in a multi-threaded database or anything else that might use serialization on multiple threads such as a server using this to send data to applets.

JavaOne 2005 is over.  The big news for us is JBI.  This spec allows components to be deployed to a container, and services to be deployed to those components.  This two stage deployment makes the hosting of services generic.  The JBI also includes a routing bus that allows customizable routing of messages between components and their services.  This can allow plug and play components within one process.  This can allow small vendors to live in the environments created by the big players.  For the integration space we can focus our resources on what we do uniquely well, and let others do some of the work.  If the large integrated app vendors like Oracle and SAP (who are on the expert group) embrace this it also opens up options to plug into their internal architecture, and / or to extend their systems from the inside.  The whole thing is driven by the WSDL type system, which supports XML but can also be used to describe opaque binary types.  The routing on the bus can be customized by policies and extended by smart routing components.

 

The big questions are about adoption rate and support by a wide enough group of vendors.  The current ESB vendors will be using this as a basis for enhanced implementations that support distribution of messages and other things.

 

To me the real power in this is to have a component architecture within one application.  The distributed use of this is nice, but not that different from MOM that has been here for a decade.  I am interested in exploiting this for application modularity and dynamic loading of modules into an application.