jeudi octobre 16, 2008

Horizons European Conference 2008

I just made it back from the Java CAPS "Horizons" EMEA conference, a user group event held in Munich Germany early this week. For those not familiar with Java CAPS, this is the SOA offering built on top of GlassFish v2. Java CAPS itself builds on top of the OpenESB project.

This was an interesting mix between technical people and more business analysts profiles. The attendance was fairly large (close to 200 I undertand) and I felt content was a good mix of engineers presenting their product and features (and future work), field experiences (from Sun Profesional Services and partners) to early customers (Java CAPS Release 6 is only a couple of months old). Of course, beyond presentations, the discussions and networking was a great value of the conference.

I presented a brief technical intro to GlassFish v2 and how it is now much less of a black box for Java CAPS users than it used to. Java CAPS users can deploy applications with multiple styles: traditional, JBI, and Java EE while using an app server on the rise with a large community. Metro is a key technology for SOA that is made available from within GlassFish.

I also "chaired" a short unconference session with OpenESB's Suresh Potiny. I'm enjoying more this format every time. Discussions covered GlassFish profiles, support for other app servers and how project Fuji will help, tuning and performance, 32. vs. 64-bit JVMs, and more. I demoed VisualVM (now shipping with Java 6) and its GlassFish Plugin which, from follow-up conversations, were very well accepted.

I enjoyed the size and the tone of the conference. I'm pretty sure Sun customers and partners got the information and energy they came for. Congrats to Jason and team for setting this up!