Yesterday I came back home after having spent more than 16 hours in planes and airports and dealt a bit with the obvious jet lag.
The first Java In Action conference was a big success. Sure, there were some minor issues due to it being the first time and all, but I genuinely had an interesting time and lots of fun. I'm already looking forward to next year and judging from some of the plans they were making, it's going to be an even better conference!
Most of the cool stuff happened outside the presentations though. I sat down quite a number of times to give personalized demonstrations and walkthrough about RIFE's capabilities. Several people got very interested and I'll be looking into adding portlet support (after a number of very interesting talks with Doug Bateman) and seeing how to integrate or support JSF (after sitting down a couple of times with Kito Mann). My encounter with Keith Donald was very nice also, we seem to have a lot in common and his work on Spring Rich Client is surprisingly similar to some Swing form-related work that we've been doing in the background. I'll be looking at SpringRCP in a couple of weeks to see if there's a way to contribute what we already have and combine our efforts.
Getting to finally meet all these people in real life is great, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at every single encounter. Dinner each day was a nice mix of geek discussions, eating good food and having fun. What struck me particularly was that all discussions were very constructive, I can't remember a single 'our stuff rules yours sucks' statement. Even when opinions differentiated, thoughts were simply exchanged so that every one could grasp the position of the other. It's great being amongst so many bright, intelligent and professional Java developers that still know how to have a good time.
I was a bit stressed before doing my presentation on Friday about The Server-side Architecture Behind OpenLaszlo Applications since it was the first time I'd talk in front of a professional Java audience. I spent a lot of time Thursday making the talk more dynamic by including video fragments and by writing a small example that did exactly the same as one of examples in the Ajax presentation the day before. This proved to have been a good idea since the audience immediately got a good view of OpenLaszlo's capabilities and saw some concise code to understand the power and the simplicity. I sat down with some of the attendees afterwards and gave some more in-depth explanations. JR and Eugene gave me some good remarks about the presentation content and I made some changes to make this presentation even better when I do it a next time.
After the conference I stayed another day in Orlando with JR, Eugene and Olga (his girlfriend). We drove over to St. Petersburg and visited the Salvador Dali museum. This is recommended for all art lovers! We spent the rest of the day at the beach, took a walk and had margaritas and key lime pie. This is recommended for everyone!
Next week I'll be talking at EuroOSCON about RIFE, but I'm sure that it will not be as much fun since few of my friends will be attending. Looking forward to TheServerSide Java Symposium now, if I get invited.
