It has been less than a week since JUDCon India ended and I'm still hearing so many good things about the event. In the end I wasn't able to attend (don't ask!) and that only makes me miss the event even more. Whether it's Dimitris telling us about the record number of participants (800!), Jaikiran enthusiastic about the sessions and even taking community Q&A for the Hibernate team, Manik giving his take on it, or one of the many other articles or tweets, it seems that this was probably the best JUDCon ever and certainly the biggest! My thanks go out to all of the people who made this a success: the presenters, the attendees and the organisers. I am glad we took the decision to try India this time and I hope that it won't be the last time we go there. Of course we'll be having another JUDCon with JBossWorld (look out for the Call for Presentations very soon!) but it's important that we move the workshop around so that we can allow much wider participation from our community. So you never know ... maybe JUDCon will be coming to a city near you soon!

I'll leave you with a few images from the event that help to convey the great feeling of participation and community buzz that I think I could feel even from the UK!

We've been working on this for a while, but we're finally able to announce that JUDCon London is open for presentation submissions! This time we're co-located with JAX London so attendees of both will be able to take advantage of this. We're cramming a lot into JUDCon this time, so take a look at the CfP and if you've got any ideas for submissions then get them in quickly as we're having to close the process on the 5th of September. (It took longer to finalise this than I'd have liked, but I'm sure we'll still get some great submissions.)

One final word: this may not be the last JUDCon for 2011/early 2012. I don't want to spoil the surprise just yet, so watch this space!

We've just completed the lineup for the next Boston JUDCon and although it hasn't gone public yet I can say that it was very difficult deciding on the sessions. We had far more submissions this time and the quality across the board was excellent, with a great mix of presenters from within JBoss and our communities. This was really good to see as well.

We had originally thought that two tracks for two days would suffice, giving us room for about 24 presentations. That in itself would make for an excellent agenda and hopefully a similarly excellent turn out of attendees. However, we got over 50 submissions for JUDCon and it was simply impossible to whittle them down down by over 50%! I've been on countless program committees over the years and I don't recall having had as much trouble with them as we did here. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. Anything but! This is a great situation for us to be in and I think it shows that JUDCon has quickly become an accepted part of the JBoss community.

So rather than get rid of sessions that really deserved to be in the conference, we racked our brains for ways around the problem. Maybe we try to add a couple more sessions early in the morning or during the hackfests? Maybe during lunch? Unfortunately neither of those options would really suffice and give the sessions the attention they deserve or allow us to have as many extra sessions as I wanted. Plus I don't want JUDCon to feel like it's chaotic or a mishmash of presentations. Therefore, we've decided to add an extra track all to itself (we're not sure whether it will be across both days or just one). This should give us about 30 presentations covering a wide range of topics that I'm sure all JBoss developers will want to attend. The fun will be choosing which ones to go to!

Now unfortunately even with this extra track we can't really cram 50+ sessions into the conference. Plus it wouldn't be right to accept everything that's submitted to JUDCon: a little competition really does help! So some presentations won't get in this time, but I really hope that those submitters aren't disheartened and will resubmit these sessions (or submit something new) to the next JUDCon in a few months time. Remember that without your submissions JUDCon wouldn't be as appealing or successful as it is!

And with that I'll just say thanks to everyone who submitted a session. We appreciate all of the hard work you put into them and the good problems that caused in making the final selection.

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!

http://pilhuhn.blogspot.com/2010/10/judcon-berlin-review-with-pictures.htmlIt's almost 2 weeks since JUDCon Berlin started and I wanted to give a retrospective on how it went and what lessons we have learnt.

The venue itself was incredible and many thanks to all those involved in organising things. And although we were late to putting out a call for papers and then the subsequent agenda (note to ourselves, we need to do both of these well in advance of the actual date for the event), the attendance was terrific. We've had several people blog about their perceptions of the event, but I can say that every one of the sessions I attended was packed, often with between 40 and 60 people. As you can see from the agenda, we also had a good mix of JBoss people presenting as well as community participation. All of the talks were good technically and many of them were pretty entertaining as well; for instance, Steve Ross-Talbot's on Testable Architecture and the Savara project.

The hackfest and lightning talk events on the first evening went well into the night, with several good sessions. Where we probably need to improve things is in this area: it was slightly too free-form, so in the future we're likely to have a lightweight process in place that helps identify which hackfests are going on and where. However, even saying that, the feedback I received on the night and the next day was that the hackfest went well and those who attended got a lot out of it.

Compared to the first JUDCon in Boston, I think this one went better. Not because the quality of the presentations was better, or that we had better attendees, but purely because we had two days over which to schedule things. Trying to push 2 days worth of sessions into 1 day, which is what we did in Boston, made things more complicated for those attending and impacted the feeling of community that we wanted to achieve. So in the future we will definitely try to have 2 days or limit the amount we try to achieve in the time we have available.

So in conclusion, I thought that Berlin was a great venue for the event and that, in the main, we did a great job of hosting it and scheduling a series of presentations. We may even make Berlin the home for JUDCon Europe for the next few years if there's enough positive feedback ;-)

My thanks again to all those who attended as well as all of those who helped to create and organise JUDCon Berlin (not all of whom could attend). It rocked!

We've been spending a lot of time and effort thinking about how best to structure the hackfests that we're setting up to run throughout the night of JUDCon. With this being the first ever JUDCon we don't have any precedence to fall back on, so we've been basing this on our collective experiences from other conferences and workshops.

In the general spirit of JUDCon ("By developers for developers") we're going to ensure that the hackfests are as technical as they need to be so people can come along and learn as well as contribute to their favourite project(s). There'll be several JBoss Core Developers around at each hackfest throughout, just to answer questions and facilitate collaboration. But the general theme will be on promoting different topics/projects of interest, with the potential for several groups to be working through problems with their communities concurrently. The initial list of topics will be published on the JUDCon site before the event, but we'll allow for people to add more on the day. I know that Bob McWhirter will be there to discuss JBoss Cloud, Ruby and JBossMC Deployers, for example, and I'm hoping to persuade Bill Burke to stick around and help with any REST questions and tasks that may arise.

If you're completely new to JBoss, open source or simply want to move from being a user to being a contributor, then we'll have a list of project tasks that we'll be giving out on a first-come-first-served basis. Of course we'll not expect you to have to work on them alone, particularly if this would be your first time, so the JBoss people will be there to lend a hand. But this is a great way to get to know the open source methodology as well as become part of an open source community.

Finally, we're introducing the concept of "lightning talks": every hour or so a few people will get a chance to stand up and give a quick presentation on a topic, project or idea that's important to them. It could be related to a JIRA that they've been working on. It could be about a new open source project they're thinking of starting up. It could be about a specific aspect of an existing project that they believe the audience will find interesting. As long as it's related to the core theme of JUDCon, pretty much anything will be allowed. There'll be a sign-up sheet on the day and we'll make the selections as we go through the evening.

So there'll be a lot going on in the hackfests and plenty of opportunity to get involved. I'm hoping we can provide sustenance for the body as well as the mind throughout the night, so come along!