Rhine Main in Weisbaden, Germany, played host to finale of the JAX Conference, which was organized alongside Enterprise Architektur Konferenz and Eclipse Forum Europe 2006. With 1600 participants, 10 sponsors and 55 exhibitors, the conference could have well set a record. A significant achievement was that the JAX Expo was for the first time accessible free of charge to visitors who were not participating in the conferences.

Ivo Totev of Software AG and Doug Clarke of Oracle delivered the last two keynotes of the conference. Totev in his keynote spoke of SOA control. He named the integrations of legacy applications one of the most substantial motives of enterprises set on service-oriented architecture. “Many customers would presently be in the testing phase of SOA and would have tested approximately 5-10 services. If the trend goes on, those 5-10 services could grow to become 50, and a clear governance strategy would then become necessary,” Totev said. “For management and governance of SOA, five points need to be considered: meaningful description of SOA components (services), definition of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), reporting the use of services, analysis and control of effects on the overall system - if individual services are changed, extensive re-use of existing functionality,” he added. In conclusion, Totev appealed to the participants to look at the European market while choosing their software instruments before “fishing in the larger pond”. “Europeans should not become pure consumers for software, either in North America or Asia,” Totev said, referring to the necessity for European innovations and initiatives.

Doug Clarke dealt with Oracle’s new open source initiative for EJB 3.0, speaking in particular on Java Persistence API (JPA). The most important features of the API are configuration, inquiry ability, transactions, support of relational databases, flexibility of architecture and the expandability for tool offerers. JPA runs both within and outside Java EE containers.

Clarke first displayed a demo of the Eclipse Dali project, led by Oracle. Dali is an object relational EJB mapping technology. Clarke also spoke about TopLink Essentials, a free and open source available basic version of TopLink. The project concerns the official reference implementation of the JPA standard, which is also a component of Sun’s open source project Glassfish. The Essentials variant is based on the same engine as the commercial TopLink tool.