Yesterday I attended a NLJUG university session at Sun Amersfoort. Topic was Glassfish v3 which is coming soon. Glassfish is Sun's open source application server.
While most of the technical details went too deep for me (I'm not using this stuff on a daily basis) I tried to grasp the main line. For me it's the focus on the two stakeholders: developers and system managers. For the system managers clustering is pretty easy now and they also demo'd SNMP support. For the developers it's very handy that you can fix a bug, save the file and then test your webpage again without restarting the appserver and needing to recreate the testsituation. You just refresh the page and it all works, your entire session is kept intact.
But Java EE development is still pretty complex. How much emphasis should we put on all the tools and technical details as opposed to logic and creating maintainable applications?