Transylvania Java User Group Roundup

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!

JBoss AS 7 at Transylvania JUG

I'll be going to Transylvania to present at the Transylvania Java User Group on 13 March.

I'll be talking about the recently released JBoss AS 7. I'll cover the road to Java EE 6 certification, how we did the performance improvements and our brand new management layer. There will be plenty of demos taking a basic EE application, testing it and getting it working in the cloud with a HTML 5 client.

Hope to see you there!

JBoss AS 7 at Devoxx

I just got back from my first ever Devoxx, and it is a really great conference - I was very pleasantly surprised! The auditoriums for the main talks were amazing.

Dimitris, Pete, Carlo, Dan, Lincoln, Aslak, Andrew, Max and I (apologies if I forgot anybody, there were quite a few of us) did a BOF on JBoss AS 7 with good attendance and some great questions from the audience. In hindsight I wish I'd prepared some demos for anticipated questions though.

It was a very nice experience to hang around the JBoss booth and finally meet some real AS 7 users after having worked on AS 7 the past year and a half. Users of older versions of the application server seemed to be impressed by the much improved configuration and domain management of AS 7. From the chats I had that seemed to be the thing people were most impressed by/disliked the most in previous versions.

Then there were numerous other talks by the usual JBoss suspects, all of which were great and packed. Since I'm biased and work on AS 7 I loved Andrew Rubinger and Dan Allen's talk on AS 7, and of course Pete Muir's talk on OpenShift. There will be more blogs from the rest of the team on our jboss.org events page.