JavaOne Latin America 2012 was held at the Transamerica Expo Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 4-6. The conference was a resounding success with a great vibe, excellent technical content and numerous world class speakers. Some notable local and international speakers included Bruno Souza, Yara Senger, Mattias Karlsson, Vinicius Senger, Heather Vancura, Tori Wieldt, Arun Gupta, Jim Weaver, Stephen Chin, Simon Ritter and Henrik Stahl. Topics covered included the JCP/JUGs, Java SE 7, HTML 5/WebSocket, CDI, Java EE 6, Java EE 7, JSF 2.2, JMS 2, JAX-RS 2, Arquillian and JavaFX.

Bruno Borges and I manned the GlassFish booth at the Java Pavilion on Tuesday and Webnesday. The booth traffic was decent and not too hectic. We met a number of GlassFish adopters including perhaps one of the largest GlassFish deployments in Brazil as well as some folks migrating to Java EE from Spring. We invited them to share their stories with us. We also talked with some key members of the local Java community.

Tuesday evening we had the GlassFish party at the Tribeca Pub. The party was definitely a hit and we could have used a larger venue (this was the first time we had the GlassFish party in Brazil). Along with GlassFish enthusiasts, a number of Java community leaders were there. We met some of the same folks again at the JUG leader's party on Wednesday evening.

On Thursday Arun Gupta, Bruno Borges and I ran a hands-on-lab on JAX-RS, WebSocket and Server-Sent Events (SSE) titled "Developing JAX-RS Web Applications Utilizing Server-Sent Events and WebSocket". This is the same Java EE 7 lab run at JavaOne San Francisco. The lab provides developers a first hand glipse of how an HTML 5 powered Java EE application might look like. We had an overflow crowd for the lab (at one point we had about twenty people standing) and the lab went very well. The slides for the lab are here:

The actual contents for the lab is available here. Give me a shout if you need help getting it up and running.

I gave two solo talks following the lab. The first was on JMS 2 titled "What’s New in Java Message Service 2". This was essentially the same talk given by JMS 2 specification lead Nigel Deakin at JavaOne San Francisco. I talked about the JMS 2 simplified API, JMSContext injection, delivery delays, asynchronous send, JMS resource definition in Java EE 7, standardized configuration for JMS MDBs in EJB 3.2, mandatory JCA pluggability and the like. The session went very well, there was good Q & A and someone even told me this was the best session of the conference! The slides for the talk are here:

My last talk for the conference was on JAX-RS 2 in the keynote hall. Titled "JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API" this was basically the same talk given by the specification leads Santiago Pericas-Geertsen and Marek Potociar at JavaOne San Francisco. I talked about the JAX-RS 2 client API, asyncronous processing, filters/interceptors, hypermedia support, server-side content negotiation and the like. The talk went very well and I got a few very kind complements afterwards. The slides for the talk are here:

On a more personal note, Sao Paulo has always had a special place in my heart as the incubating city for Sepultura and Soulfy -- two of my most favorite heavy metal musical groups of all time! Consequently, the city has a perpertually alive and kicking metal scene pretty much any given day of the week.

This time I got to check out a solid performance by local metal gig Republica at the legendary Manifesto Bar. I also wanted to see a Dio Tribute at the Blackmore but ran out of time and energy...

Overall I enjoyed the conference/Sao Paulo and look forward to going to Brazil again next year!