Last week's JBossWorld was only the second one to be held coincident with Red Hat Summit. It was also the first time we ran JUDCon and the outcome of that was very good. But back to JBossWorld: the attendance was way up on last year and the feeling around the place was definitely electric. All of the sessions I attended were packed, with some of them standing room only. And it was also great to see a mix of Red Hat Summit and JBossWorld attendees in the same sessions, breaking down those artificial barriers.
I gave my usual State of the Union talk at the start (though messed it up a bit by forgetting what time I started and thinking I was about to overrun I rushed a few slides!) As someone pointed out later, there really is way too much to cover in one hour as well. Then the technical sessions kicked off, covering all of our platforms and showing how much innovation we're doing to keep JBoss at the forefront of middleware and open source leaders. Anyone at the conference couldn't fail to notice the impact of Cloud and several of the JBoss sessions picked on this topic in some detail, giving an outline of where we are heading.
Of course it wouldn't be a JBossWorld without a party and a pub crawl. This time there were several of the former, but only one pub crawl. It as interesting to be on stage at 8:30am the following morning and notice that there were a lot of people either not there in the audience or wishing they weren't there! But hey, that's one of the reasons people enjoy these events and keep coming back!
Overall I think this was probably the best JBossWorld since 2006 and Vegas. We seemed to have the right mix of technical and business tracks, as well as ample opportunity for people to mix and debate the presentations. I also think that JUDCon helped too by giving people who wouldn't necessarily think of attending JBossWorld the opportunity to do so. Hopefully we'll see more of them back next year too!
