I just got back from the presenting JBoss Application Server 7 at the Transylvania User Group last night. I didn't know much about Romania before I went, but I was impressed by the friendly people and enthusiastic crowd at the event, and was taken very well care of by Gabriel Pop, the organiser, and the other locals. Everything was great apart from that the only direct flights between Cluj and London mean getting up at 4am both going there and coming back :-) The centre of Cluj was pretty, and the restaurants I got taken to were excellent.
We covered why JBoss AS 7 is so fast and had a demo introducing Java EE 6. A majority of the crowd were Spring users but the feedback I got indicated that they were impressed by the simplified programming model introduced in Java EE 6. I got a few chuckles when I complained that the initial start of the application server during the demo was slow, since it started in 2 seconds. Restarting it it started in the 1.3s I am used to on my laptop.
I then went on to explain and demo the JBoss 7 management model, and then revisited the original EE 6 demo and tested it using Arquillian before adding JAX-RS features to it and deploying it to OpenShift using a mobile HTML 5 client to interact with the server via JAX-RS.
The feedback was very good after the event, I had lots of people using JBoss AS 5.x, WebLogic, WebSphere etc. coming up to me saying they now wanted to move to AS 7. And thanks to the people who hung around for dinner afterwards, it was fun - and yes I did manage to get up for my flight after 3 hours of sleep!
