lundi octobre 08, 2007

Java conference in Athens

This was my first trip to Greece and I must say I had a very good time thanks to wonderfully friendly JUG hosts Paris & Panos. This is one very nice Java User Group that seems to be doing very well. The audience for this event was close to 200. Maybe the rich agenda had something to do with this.

The GlassFish map didn't show Greece as one of the top countries in the World. Maybe this has to do with the JBoss AS lead developer living in Athens as well as being in the audience. So my presentation covered Java EE 5 (2 slides), GlassFish v2 (main part of the presentation given we've just released this major version), Java EE 6 (brief), GlassFish v3 (HK2 kernel + demo), and a brief description of the broader community. The presentation slides should soon be online on the event page.

I also discussed with a couple of GlassFish users. They seemed very pleased with both the current product and the early work on GlassFish v3. Questions I got were around JBoss performance (answer: ask them, not me!), licensing (answer: CDDL let's you reuse GlassFish bits as part of a commercial offering), external commiters (depends on the module, JSF has several).

It was also nice to meet other speakers (Roman, Jonas, Alef, and Heinz). Some interesting discussions before and after the event. Paris and Panos took some of us out on the night before the enjoy typical Greek food. Very nice.

Finally, it was a good opportunity to meet with the Noemax people who provide components for Microsoft WCF (the Web Services stack in .Net 3.0). In particular these people provide a FastInfoset and SOAP/TCP extensions to WCF. These are of course interoperable with GlassFish's Metro stack. We also discussed how Java and .Net developer communities differ. All in all a great conversation.

Paris has a report on the event as well as a few photos. Roman's is here.

mercredi septembre 12, 2007

Swimming to Athens (Greek JUG)

Customers, developer events, and JUGs are all great speaking and discussion experiences but I think I like events organized by JUG the best (JavaPolis is one such example). I'm set to visit the JHUG and its Tech Day in Athens on October 6th (2007). Besides GlassFish, other topics cover code quality, Concurrency, NetBeans, Spring, Terracotta. Should be fun!

Let me know if you're already a GlassFish user or simply trying it out and if you'd like to hear/see something specific. I'll try to adapt the presentation and demos. If you'd like to chat about Java, GlassFish, Sun, Wine, or Greece (my first time), I'm open for diner on Friday and Saturday.