Atlanta Sun Tech Days

I attended the Sun Tech Days event in Atlanta last week on Jan 9th and 10th. The developer focused event attracted a large crowd - several hundred people showed up. I managed the GlassFish booth both these days and met a lot of people, mostly developers. Many of them had downloaded GF and had done some development work on it, some were using it in production and others were just curious. Overall, most people knew something or the other about GF but many did not realize it was free to use in production.

Things people repeatedly praised :
* Price. People were happy with the simple support pricing structure too.
* Netbeans tool integration - "Works great and is free!" was the comment of someone from a startup.
* Admin console layout - easy to use and manage. Specially a lot of JBOSS users like the GF administration console
* Installation ease


Some of the questions were :

* What is an application server?
* What is the difference between an application server and a web server?
* I am using Tomcat. What is the benefit of using GlassFish over Tomcat?
* We use JBOSS in our company. How does GF compare with JBOSS?
* What's the difference between GlassFish and Sun Java System Application Server?
* How do I do a multi-machine cluster setup?
* How do I do load-balancing?
* How do I monitor? How do I know what's wrong when things dont work as expected.
Lots of people wanted to know about monitoring.
* Do you have a migration tool? I am interested in trying out GF, but we have a large deployment on IBM Websphere.
* Is there a GF plugin for IntelliJ IDE?
* How does EJB entity caching work with GF? I looked for it but didnt see any option.
* I wanted to define payload policies for webservices but didnt see a way to do it. How do do it?
* Does GF come with a JBI runtime? Or do I have to get something separately?
* If GF is such a great appserver, why is Sun giving this away for free?


Overall it was an exciting event. Great to see the growing interest in GlassFish.

Posted at 02:42PM Jan 16, 2008 by sirajg in Sun  |  Comments[2]