An informative article, based on a 2010 JavaOne (San Francisco, California) panel session, surveys a variety of expert perspectives on Java EE 6.

The panel, moderated by Oracle's Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, consisted of:

* Adam Bien, Consultant Author/ Speaker, adam-bien.com
* Emmanuel Bernard, Principal Software Engineer, JBoss by Red Hat,
* David Blevins, Senior Software Engineer, and co-founder of the OpenEJB project and a     founder of Apache Geronimo
* Roberto Chinnici, Technical Staff Consulting Member, Oracle
* Jim Knutson, Java EE Architect, IBM
* Reza Rahman, Lead Engineer, Caucho Technology, Inc.,
* Krasimir Semerdzhiev, Development Architect, SAP Labs Bulgaria

The panel addressed such topics as Platform and API Adoption, Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI), Java EE vs. Spring, the impact of Java EE 6 on tooling and testing, Java EE.next, along with a variety of audience questions.

Read the entire article for the whole picture.

While I am not in Antwerp to take in Devoxx 2010 (November 15-19), I can at least tour the blogs of people who are there to get a taste of the proceedings. Here's some news from the first two days.

Papo's Log, run by developer Paris Apostolopoulos, provides an excellent summary of no fewer than 14 sessions, delving into such topics as Java EE, Agile ALM, Hibernate, Android, VisualVM and other matters. Thank you, Paris! He also includes a link to an entertaining YouTube video created by the Paris Jug Team that provides a feeling for what it's like to be there.

The void-main-args blog, run by a developer calling himself "anrizal," has a lot to report on Scala, Hazelcast, HBase, Hadoop, MongoDB, Spring Tools, Apache Mahout, Excel on JVM, and more. If these things interest you, it's worth checking out.

Oracle's Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine's reports that his first day was lively but exhausting. His "Java EE 6 Tutorial, Reloaded" session with its 15 demos was firing on all cylinders. As if the three-hour session was not enough, Alexis and his co-presenter, Antonio Goncalves, spent another three running a Hands-On lab where they had lots of good conversations comparing NetBeans to other IDEs, JSF to Struts, and CDI/EJB to Spring, among other things.

Java Champion Adam Bien seemed pleased with his session which was attended by some 110 developers. He reports that he, "prepared four slides, showed two and spent the rest of the time implementing an application suggested by one of the attendee - a Ticketing System (he had to build it afterwards in a real world project). We covered CDI with some  corner cases (building plugins, replacing JMS, qualifiers, stereotypes, configuration), EJB 3.1, unit tested and mocked out some EJB 3.1 without interfaces, Interceptors, JPA, Bean Validation, a bit JSF 2, discussed / implemented some REST applications and tested the load (3000 transactions / second for a GET-REST and two chained EJB 3.1). We focused more on 'best practices,' design and architectures."

All in all, there's a lot of useful technical information in the blogs coming out of Devoxx.