In case any of you missed my tweet, I learned so much today that it actually took me a good twenty minutes to remember what my first session was about!

I eventually remembered, it was The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java. Interesting concept, but doesn’t seem ready for prime-time quite yet because it does not support JIT compiling the PHP to bytecode like the other scripting languages like Groovy and JRuby do. If you’re interested, the project is WebSphere sMash and it is being developed by IBM and falls under the umbrella of the ProjectZero incubator. It is being developed transparently, the source code is available, but it is not open source.

Session number two was by far the best of the day, JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services. This session covered the basics of REST</acronym> and then went through an incredible live-coded example using the JSR-311 reference implementation Jersey. I love the simplicity of the annotations and the fact that Jersey can run as a Java SE app without a web container opens the door for some interesting implementations.

The next two sessions really weren’t that interesting, but after dinner I went back to the Moscone Center for Jersey - RESTful WebServices Made Easy. This session was not as technical as the JAX-RS session, but still provided some neat demos (including an example using a SunSpot), and offered some insight into the Jersey project. Because I enjoyed the REST sessions so much I’ll be checking out the blog’s of the presenters: Marc Hadley, Paul Sandoz, and Jakub Podlesak.

So far, other than the food, I’m very impressed with JavaOne, and I might even go as far as saying it is better than TheServerSide Symposium was last year. Although the Cult-of-Java is almost as extreme as the Cult-of-Apple, which I do find pretty odd. The keynote was entertaining and interesting, but not that interesting!