mardi mai 27, 2008

Amis GlassFish and OpenESB presentations last week - Success!

If you're tracking Java EE progress by reading the blogosphere, you probably came across Amis' blog. This is a Dutch system integrator specializing in Oracle technologies but actively looking at open source alternatives to provide choice to their customer.

Wouter, one of the company's active architect and blogger invited me to present in their home-town of Nieuwegein. This was initially meant to be a JBoss/GlassFish shootout but that couldn't happen. The actual agenda had me cover GlassFish and friends (a little hard the cram all this in the 90 minutes, but the OpenOffice presenter screen cam in quite handy) while Wouter did a hands-on presentation of OpenESB and its NetBeans tooling to an audience of about 40 people who stayed until 9pm (maybe the final drink had to do something with that, who knows?).

The audience was great. Many good questions during and after the presentation. Some had to do with TopLink vs EclipseLink, others with TerraCotta, GigaSpaces, and GlassFish clustering, while others yet had to do with Apache front-tier configuration. Wouter did a great job both presenting but also demoing a full application built to run on OpenESB 2.0. I understand that many people in the audience were very pleased to see the visual, yet standard and transparent way of building BPEL, WSDL, or XSLT artifacts.

Amis people had nice words for the GlassFish and NetBeans community (welcoming new people, any level of questions, contributions, ...). In the future I hope we can be successful with GlassFish because our partners like Amis are themselves successful with the technology. Expect a formal GlassFish partner program for system integrators in the coming months.

Let me thank Wouter and the folks at Amis, this was a very enjoyable moment with great discussions. Oh, and thank you for the traditional clogs, my kids love them (they don't believe people actually wear them ;)!