Review of JAX 07
We’re back from JAX 07. I’d like to share some excerpts of Dierk Koenig’s report, who received the JAX Innovation Award on behalf of the Groovy team, with you. Here’s what he had to say:
JAX has grown again and with 1′900 attendees it is certainly one of the biggest Java events in the German-speaking region. The general organization is above average with some room for improvement when it comes to accommodation and lodging. Attendees are very interested, knowledgeable, and open for discussion. The session topics are a bit high-level rather than down to the technical details. Talks like “Mixing Ajax, Swing, and Flash” by Sibylle Peter and Matthias Huber were a refreshing exception.
I arrived Monday afternoon and after a joint effort to prepare the Canoo booth and checking in at the hotel, the speaker & VIP reception was held at the Kurhaus in Wiesbaden, right below the Casino. This was an interesting mixture of overdressed Casino guests and casual programming geeks in the lobby!
I learned that Tammo Freese and Johannes Link used Groovy in the testing workshop that day. Both suggested to run a joint full-day Groovy workshop at the W-JAX this year.
I also talked to Emmanuel Bernard (RedHat) who currently works on Groovy support for Seam that he is going to release soon.
On Tuesday, Daniel Pfeifer and Bruno Schaeffer delivered their talk on RIA Patterns and Sibylle and Matthias talked on mixing Ajax, Swing, & Flash. Both talks were very well received. Well done, everybody!
At the evening ballroom session, I hosted the Groovy/Grails table with too many beers and more loud talking than was good for my voice. On Wednesday morning, I noticed that Gina was already sold out at the Addison-Wesley booth after only one day of expo.
I started with my general Groovy talk in a room with about 120 seats when it became so overcrowded that the session was moved over to the big plenum stage. It must have been 250 people or so. A fun experience. Later I connected with Sven Haiges and we recorded another three editions of the Groovy tutorial series for his podcast. My voice almost broke while recording.
Before the evening keynote, the JAX innovation award ceremony took place where I had the honor to receive the first prize on behalf of the Groovy team. Note that this prize not only awards EUR 10′000 to the winner but also strives to select the most innovative, creative, and influential European project or product of the last year.
In the late evening BoF sessions, Daniel joined Sven and Peter Rossbach to discuss the state of AJAX, while I was concerned with the future of programming languages. I was very surprised to see about 100 attendees at that BoF when the warm evening was actually calling for a beer garden.
Thursday started with checking out from the hotel and a much too short breakfast. I headed for the WebTest talk with Marc Guillemot. We held it in the 300 seats room, which was pretty much filled. It was much fun talking about our day-to-day occupation. The audience was very responsive and had good questions in the Q&A part and personal ones after the talk.
I attended the Grails talk by Sven Haiges, which was great as always. As the first session of the afternoon, I talked about “Usage Patterns for Scripting Languages on the JVM” in the 200 seats room, which was stuffed to capacity. It was fun recognizing the faces that seem to show up in all of my talks. I also managed to add a couple of cross-references to ULC. Lots of people approached me after the presentation. Sebastian Meyen invited my to the JAX-TV where we ran a 20-minute interview on various topics around Groovy. Of course, I wore my Canoo polo shirt.
We’re back on the road next Saturday to go to San Francisco. Come and see us at JavaOne from May 8 to May 11. We’re at booth #715.
