Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.

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Monday March 23, 2009

GlassFish Workshop @ Milwaukee Trip Report - Met famous Santoor player

Peter and I presented on GlassFish at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee last week. The slides were already made available to the attendees. And since the workshop offered for a charge, the slides will not be shared here :) Let us know if you'd like to conduct a similar workshop in your location.

The workshop ran from 8:30am until 4:00pm. Peter did a wonderful job of demonstrating GlassFish integration in NetBeans and Eclipse, an extensive GlassFish Enterprise Manager demo, Dynamic Languages slides, and multiple other things!

One of the interesting sessions was right after lunch when all the attendees candidly shared experience of their deployment environments and their reason for attending the workshop. The room had 40% NetBeans users and 70% Eclipse users. I've observed a continuous upsurge in the number of NetBeans users in the past few conferences. And it was certainly exciting to know that approx 50% are aware of GlassFish and 1/2 of them are already using for development. Most of them were attending to gain better understanding of GlassFish capabilities and then use it in their production environment. And then there were some who wanted to understand how GlassFish is a superior offering than others.

And guess what - even couple of attendees were already using it in production. Their main reasons for migrating from Tomcat to GlassFish:

NetBeans integration
Web-based Admin Console backed by a powerful "asadmin" CLI

They had no trouble migrating their application from Tomcat to GlassFish, just a minor tweak and the application worked seamlessly. Yet another happy user of GlassFish :) Hopefully everybody had an opportunity to revise or learn some new tricks from the talk. Here are some pictures taken during the workshop:

Here is some feedback from the attendees:

Great presentation on GlassFish today, there is more to that application server than I thought. (tweeted here)

and

#glassfish is pretty freaking cool, our company just isn't ready for that level though. (tweeted here)

The hospitality of the workshop hosts was very welcoming starting from airport pick up/drop off, hotel pick up, dinner, and short tour of the city right after the talk. The arrangement during the workshop was pretty good however the presentation connector for Apple Air caused us some grief to begin with ;-)

I also had the opportunity to meet the local Campus Ambassador, a Ph D student at the University:

Milwaukee is known as Brew City or Cream City, Miller is the only major brand left though. The city is also known for Harley Davidson head quarters, Lake Michigan, Summer Festival, and Milwaukee Art Museum amongst many other things. Check out some pictures from in/around the city:

Personally, one of the highlights was bumping into Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, a world renowned Santoor player, during a dinner at a local Thai restaurant. Our workshop host (who happens to be Indian) mentioned that Pandit ji is peforming with Ustad Zakir Hussain, the most famous name and a living legend in the world of Tabla, in Milwaukee next morning. The local Indian community gathered to honor him and we happen to be sitting on the next table.

We had an extremely embarrassing moment when we approached him asking "Are you Ustaad Zakir Hussein ?". He said "I'm not but he'll be performing on the stage tomorrow". For a moment we thought he was just tricking us but felt terrible when realized that we tagged him as the wrong person. Pandit ji has gained all the reputation one can fathom in the world of music and kept talking to us in a very polite manner. I always wonder there is so much to learn from these luminaries, but we certainly felt awful afterwards and apologized as well.

We almost decided to go to an Indian restaurant for dinner but glad we picked Thai instead. We might have met Ustad Zakir Hussain in the other restaurant ;-) You can check out their complete itinerary at momentrecords.com.

Enjoy one of his old videos: