Wrapping up JavaZone ’08

JavaZone is a very well run conference. Lots of people, overall good content, reasonably good food (for a conference that is), power trips everywhere, and a overflow system so popular that the conference rooms are emptier than they should be (a bit hard for the speakers).

My session on Scripting on GlassFish (slides) was the very first one of the conference in a medium-size room. I think it went very well given it was my first time delivering it. Certainly a standing-room only with about 250 people was a nice surprise. I’ll admit I was expecting more Rails, Grails, and PHP developers in the room than the 10% that admitted being in that camp. I’m happy I had kept some “GlassFish v3 value for JavaEE developers” content in the slides and demos (dynamic loading of services, fast startup time, etc..). I’ve had one feedback requesting more details (fair enough, I had a fair amount of ground to cover) and several people finding the approach of runtime-consolidating multiple languages on a single technology/product to be a very compelling idea.

It was fun to find people embedding GlassFish in their product (moving soon to GlassFish v3 embedded I understand) on the show floor, to hear a good number of speakers mention GlassFish in their respective talks, and hang around with the French mafia (Bernard, Julien, Guillaume et Jérôme), all speakers at the event.

Overall a lot of OSGi here and there, but most people don’t seem interested and those who are end up walking out of the room when they see the nighty gritty details. Hudson certainly got its share of coverage in most (if not all) of the agile sessions.