JBoss World – The First full day

Just wrapped up the first full day of JBoss World here in Chicago and wanted to share some of my thoughts.  To start, this is my first time attending the event so I did not really know what to expect.  Attendance seems to be very good and probably more than I had expected given the economy.  However, it is hard to judge who is there on the RHEL track versus JBoss given it is a shared event.  In fact, that seems to be the leading question in small talk at lunch and in the pavilion!  “So…., you here for RHEL or JBoss?”

Picking my highlights of the day:

• Attended a Seam session co-hosted by Dan Allen, author of Seam in Action and now part of the JBoss team.  Gathered some good tips/tricks on Seam but also glad to meet Dan since I really appreciate his book.  In it, he has no qualms about pointing out both the strong and weak points in the technology.

• My colleague, Matt Van Bergen, dragged me over to the eXo booth for something “I had to see”.  He was right.  They are doing some great work with both the portal and wcm products I saw and sounds like they are ready to release their first beta product after partnering with JBoss to embed the JBoss portal container inside their product.  Besides their polished and advanced UI, eXo also adds a clusterable JCR implementation to the mix, something that you did not get (at least out of the box) with the Jackrabbit implementation in the current JBoss Portal.  I am looking forward to release of this project on JBoss Community in the next day or so.  More on the eXo / JBoss partnership can be found here.

There was plenty more during the day, including lunch with two attendees who had come in from Australia the night before.  It was their first time to Chicago and they were awed by the “IMAX-sized landscape of the downtown buildings”.  The guy next to me was a New Yorker and just chuckeled.