My company, Tripod Technologies, hosted the first Philadelphia JBoss User Group meeting this past Tuesday. We had Burr Sutter from JBoss speak on JBoss ESB. In case you are not familiar with Burr, he is a current Java champion, founder of the Atlanta JUG and manager of the JBoss ESB team.
I was a little apprehensive about how many people we would get for this meeting, given that the group has been dormant for a while. As it turns out, about forty people showed up at the Unisys center in Malvern, PA. Not a bad turnout for the first meeting of a “specialty” user group. Let’s hope we can keep up the momentum. To that end, I’m trying my best to schedule someone else of Burr’s caliber to come and speak. Among other things, I’m thinking of having someone speak about JBoss Seam and Groovy. I’m hoping to get a session or two in for EJB 3 as well.
I was really impressed by Burr’s presentation too. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a coherent, unambiguous view of what ESB really is. I can only imagine that this clarity translates to the vision and implementation of the JBoss ESB product as well, although I haven’t gotten a chance to play around with it first-hand myself. The Philly JBUG site will post a copy of his excellent presentation soon (right now we are a little limited for hosting space). For now, you can download it from my website.
If you attended the meeting, I hope you liked what you saw and will spread the word. We are trying our best to deliver something that is useful to the overall Java community in Philly. I think this means reaching beyond the world of purely JBoss-centric talks. Another interesting idea is to have people in the local area talk about cool work that they do at their job. Personally, I’ve always found that very insightful rather than hearing about yet another product or technology I may or may not use. It gives “ordinary” developers a chance to showcase what they’ve accomplished too and gives me a good idea of what is going on in the local area.
If you are so inclined, do send me feedback about the JBUG. I’d really like to hear what people out there are really interested in getting out of user groups. I’m especially interested in knowing about specific speakers and topics you’d like to see at the Philly JBUG.