Wow… My first impression is much like the second:

It’s Amazing!

Have you ever seen me writing like this? No. I haven’t seen myself too. Looking back through the last two hours, I’m smiling. I was and I’m still playing with JBoss4 and EJB3 like a small boy playing with a new toy. I admire new EJB3 specification in full sense of these words. It makes life of developers so much easier than it was before with all these annoying deployment descriptors: aha, you wrote that, don’t forget to write it down here and here… yuck… I can’t call new approach “The Revolution”, but watching it all in a short period of time, like I did this evening, makes exactly these words appear on the tongue. It’s a big, no, a MAJOR step in enterprise applications development using Java.

For those of you who are in Java but still didn’t see the Public Review version of EJB3 specification I recommend to take a day (or week, which is better :) ) of vacation and spend some time in reading. Your mind will be blown away from this planet guaranteed. For the most impatient of you, here’s the URL of JBoss’ EJB3 Trailblaizer. Don’t be afraid, it’s not another sweet movie on how everything is good and how JBoss helps to save millions of hungry Africans. No, it’s a cool and very useful guide through the power features of EJB3 with lots of samples and important details. Most fascinating is that it, the trailblazer, is (1) written according to EJB3 specification and spinning on the latest JBoss server, and (2), be very attentive here, it’s available for download in source code! Before I realized that, I read half of the tutorials holding my breath, but then downloaded 17Mb! package, compiled it and installed locally in less than 10 minutes. Now I have complete offline version of it locally. You know, my traffic is pretty expensive, but I believe it is one of the most important investments since September. ;) (it’s really important and very useful)

JBoss application server is great and stable as usual. I just don’t know what else can I write about it. No surprises — it just works as intended. Oh, no, wait a second. I can recall I saw one small surprise. Maybe it’s me who haven’t seen the JBoss for a while, but now the Hypersonic database has embedded manager which can be called from JMX console. Using it, you can manipulate your databases directly through convenient java client. If you are already intrigued with this, take quick start guide for JBossAS and check it for instructions on how to setup the Hypersonic datasource and how to invoke the manager. Pretty impressive!

Well, I feel that if I continue to play with this amazing stuff today I will get in need of another pack of coffee tomorrow. :)

Have it served!