JavaDeus 08 was a huge success

On Thursday we [1] hosted Austria's first major Java Developer conference [2] in St. Pölten on the FH campus - as I already reported.

The event was - not only in my opinion - a great success. We had 400+ people attending (not counting the Sunnies), from students over smaller and larger ISVs to coporate developers. We had a mix of Sun and non-sun content, a mix of local and international speakers. And it was free (literally as in "free beer").

Starting with an excellent key note from Reggie Hutcherson (Manager of the Sun Technology Evangelism group), followed by the coolest demos, most importantly of the SunSPOT thingies - small Java programmable "thing" with light and 3d motion sensors and stuff... We gave on set of them away for free, and one is still to be won - or rather earned with a good idea for an application.

In the afternoon there were 4 parallel streams of break out sessions, covering everything from MySQL (were we obviously were not clear enough that the 2 presentations were not the same, sorry), openESB (excellent presentation and demo by Jason), GlassFish by Alexis (who else ;-) ), NetBeans by the Netbeans guys from Praha, SunSPOT details by Salzburg Research, etc, etc. And of course and outlook on Java 7 ...

Presentations will be posted for download on the Sun site soon (Monday, I think), I will put up a reminder here on my blog as soon as they are ready.

I had excellent conversations throughout the day and - apart from being slightly stressed - enjoyed every bit of it.

One of my favorite moments was, when - more sales focused - colleagues came almost running out of the really good jMaki presentation by Doris Chen and complained that people were talking about actualy code in there. *grin*

After that beer and BBQ were well deserved by everyone... still 200+ at the party (I guess), people only started to leave when Germany started to beat Portugal and we had to watch it...

Other reports on the conference should be searchable with the keyword "javadeus08" or "javadeus", or can be found on del.icio.us and technorati. (That is the plus side of a unique name like JavaDeus... apart from that, I still don't like it).

See y'all next year, at JavaDeus 09.

[1] Sun Microsystems, if you don't know by now ;-)
[2] well WE [1] think it was the "first major..." and people at the conference confirmed this. Sorry, if I missed someone else's efforts.