Enterprise Architecture Best Practices, Enterprise Debugging Techniques, Enterprise Application Security, Java Persistence, Spring, Eclipse, and all the hot technologies that have made JAX the premier brand for the Enterprise IT Community, greeted well over 300 delegates at the first annual JAX Asia 2006 Conference at the Meritus Mandarin Hotel on Singapore's Orchard road. The attendees were treated to over 25 top-notch sessions, delivered by expert speakers such as Craig Russell, Rod Johnson, Adam Bien, Neal Ford, Thilo Frotscher, Randel Powell, Malcolm Groves, and other industry luminaries. "This is the first-of-its kind conference in Singapore for IT architects like me wanting to stay on the cutting-edge of technological changes in the enterprise arena. At the end of two days, I can testify that this experience has been unique and will also help me apply some of the new techniques in my daily work", said an attendee from ST Electronics, one of the many corporate delegates that participated at JAX Asia 2006.
 SOA emerged as a talking point at JAX Asia 2006. Neal Ford pitched for SOA as the next wave of enterprise development and took a practical look at SOA from a developer's perspective, including such (never talked about) topics like transports, granularity, versioning services, transformations, and whether you should be doing this or not. Randel Powell and Clive Tilbrook's sessions opened up discussions on IT governance and SOA governance concepts, related use cases, requirements, aspects and possible solutions. Atul Saini, CEO of Fiorina Software, proposed software modularity via SOA as the solution to the impedance mismatch -- the Business ‘Flow’ conceived by a Business analyst and the Technology ‘Flow’ interpreted by a Technical expert.
 In his session on simpifying enterprise applications with Spring, Rod Johnson described the new AOP support in Spring 2.0, how it integrates with AspectJ, and how it fits in the construction of enterprise applications. Johnson used an example-driven approach to show delegates how to simplify the implementation of many common enterprise application requirements. Johnson quoted several enterprise-level implementations of Spring to show how the technology has matured in the last five years.
 Craig Russell was a runaway hit with the JAX Asia attendees with his profund knowledge on Java persistence and O/R mapping. Speaking to a large audience, Russell expounded on the rationale behind object-relational mapping in the Java application development space, besides demystifying concepts such as "impedance mismatch", "domain object modeling", "byte-code enhancement", "container-based persistence", "pojo persistence", "inversion of control", "native query", and "drop into SQL". In a separate session, Russell picked up from where he left on his introductory talk, tutoring the audience on the differences among the three primary open source competitors in the JPA space: TopLink, Hibernate, and OpenJPA.
Eclipse, an independent open source project endorsed by over 100 software companies worldwide, including IBM, Oracle, BEA and Macromedia, was one of the three main themes of the conference. It found a lot of takers among the audience. As tens of thousands of Eclipse developers worldwide are continually improving and extending the platform, the signs are clear in that Eclipse skills will become valuable in the marketplace for many years to come. Akmal Chaudhri's session highlighted this aspect, besides providing an introduction to the platform and the foundation behind it. Tillmann Siedel talked about some common pitfalls in plug-in development and pointed out a set of best practices on how to improve the quality of Eclipse plug-ins. Siedel also provided an overview of the Eclipse Modeling Framework and its key parts.
JAX Asia 2006 featured several other interesting sessions by Clive Tilbrook, Ed Min, Chuk-Munn Lee, Thilo Frotscher, Malcolm Groves, Alexander von Zitzewitz, and Deepak Sharma. Delegate Goh Chong Minsk summed up the mood of the attendees. "I really learned a lot from the conference and I look forward to Jax Asia 2007", said Chong Minsk, a Research Officer at the Planning & Operations Management Group at SIMTech, A*STAR.
 JAX Asia 2006 also hosted an exhibition where vendors such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, Software AG, Wily CA, Fiorano, Parasoft, Quest Software, Hello2morrow, and the conference training partners - ACA Pacific, COMAT, and New Horizons - spoke to the delegates about their products and services, besides demonstrating the various features of the products in their portfolio.
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