As I promised a week or so ago, we've been hard at work pulling together ideas for the very first JUDCon in 2011, which will be at Boston before JBossWorld. We'll do a formal Call for Presentations early in January to give everyone plenty of time to submit a session or plan the trip, but I wanted to give those people who have nothing better to do at this time of year a head start. So here's a provisional idea of what tracks we'll have, along with some examples of the type of talk that might be appropriate for that track.

JUDCon will be a 2 day event, with two tracks each day. So the four tracks will be as follows, though which day a given track will be on, and the official name for the tracks, has not yet been decided:

• track 1: Developer-oriented projects, e.g., Byteman, Arquillian etc.
• track 2: Beyond Java and Java EE, e.g., talks on Ruby, topics not covered by EE, such as CEP, BPM etc.
• track 3: JBossAS and EE6, e.g., talks on Weld, transactions, performance tuning, management etc.
• track 4: Scalability and Cloud, e.g., got anything to say about NoSQL and JPA, mobile etc?

Of course we may tweak things a bit between now and the official CfP, but the above topics will likely cover the majority of what we announce. So there you have it. Go and put your thinking caps on!

Note, if you submitted to JBossWorld and you find out that you weren't successful, there's a good chance that you have been placed into the JUDCon pool of possible sessions because your talk was considered more appropriate for the JUDCon audience. We'll put all of those cross-submitted talks on the website once we do a formal CfP and if you don't want to be considered for JUDCon just let us know then.

Have a very merry Christmas!

Update: we always have room for talks that don't necessarily fit a specific track but which are compelling for one reason or another, e.g., great use cases for JBoss projects or something just so cool that we all want to hear about it. So if you have an idea for a talk and it doesn't seem like it will fit one of the tracks initially, don't let that put you off. Submit it. You might be pleasantly surprised!