There will be no JBoss shadow conference at JavaOne this year. The JBoss Group LLC, the Atlanta company that last year hosted its JBossTwo event at the same time as Sun Microsystems Inc.'s JavaOne developer show in San Francisco, has decided to discontinue its rival conference and take a booth at JavaOne.
In the past, The JBoss Group battled publicly with Sun over whether it should have to pay to certify its JBoss application server, which is released under an open-source license, as compliant with Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specifications. In November, JBoss and Sun settled their differences, and JBoss has taken its first steps toward J2EE certification.
Since then, the company has been working within Sun's Java Community Process (JCP) to develop a new version of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification, said Bob Bickel, vice president of strategy and corporate development at JBoss.
"We have helped influence JCP standards in the past, but we officially joined the JCP this past [September]. And then we signed the J2EE certification agreement with Sun in November, and we essentially joined this EJB group a couple of months ago," he said (see story).
Sun and Java vendors such as IBM and BEA Systems Inc. are working on a new version of the specification that will be easier to use, and JBoss is contributing "significant resources" to that effort, Bickel said.
Because of its animosity toward Sun, JBoss didn't even consider participating in previous JavaOne shows. The fact that this year it will not only be present in a booth but will also participate in the show's technical sessions is indicative of a thaw in relations between the two companies, Bickel said.
But just because the JBoss shadow conference is no more doesn't mean that it won't host its own gathering at the show.
"We're going to host a little cocktail reception one night, and we'll even invite Sun people to it," Bickel said.
JavaOne will be held in San Francisco from June 28 to July 1.