One Week, Bare Workstations, Heavyweight Beans or from Scratch to Java EE 5 Patterns

last week at oose.de in Hamburg we built together a Java EE 5 application with JSF-frontend, JUnit-Tests and simple "restful" interface (restful == servlet :-)).
There were some advanced students with lot experience with databases and JDO and they asked me a lot of detailed questions (what I really appreciated).

We started with the installation of the environment, which took about 1 hour (there were some problems with admin accounts...). I used netbeans 5.5.1 with visual webpack and glassfish v2.
No one used netbeans before, so the reaction was interesting - they were curious why I mention netbeans at all. After the installation and short demonstration they become curious, at the end of
the week some of the students wanted to use it in production. Btw. I offered also Eclipse Europa, but they wanted to learn more about Netbeans.

At the first day I was asked about "heavyweight" Session Beans - but I didn't answered. Instead of answering the question directly, we did some examples with remote, local Beans and Webservices.
Especially Glassfish's Call-Stack and monitoring capabilities, Glassfish's integration in Netbeans were impressing enough to convince the "lightweight" POJO fans.

The introduction of "real objects", with the Persistent Domain Object pattern shocked some participants first, but after some samples it became clear, how efficient and lean Java EE 5 can be.

The next Java EE 5 Patterns event in Hamburg will take place in october.