On Jan 19, the DC Area JBoss Users Group (http://www.meetup.com/DC-JBug/) held a joint program with the DC/Northern Virginia Java Users Group (http://www.meetup.com/DC-Jug/).  This joint program, JBoss at 7: A new App Server, new Tools and a new Attitude (http://www.meetup.com/DC-JBug/events/45010212/),  was a great opportunity to show the larger DC Java community how far Java development has come in productivity.

Dan Allen presented to both of our groups to demonstrate the extensive set of frameworks and tools that are now available to today's Java developers.  With the power of Forge, OpenShift, and Arquillian, the audience was shown the speed and ease in which new Java applications can be created, tested, and deployed into production.  The java-bloat of 2000 is clearly gone. Dan left them clamoring for more ... and some homework.

After all, it's open source and one of the advantages of open source is that you don't have to take someone else's word for it, you get to do it yourself.  So fortunately, Dan has made his tutorial available for all to take things out for a drive themselves - http://tinyurl.com/dcjbug-jboss-workshop. 

Thanks to all the JBoss developers and community for creating such a jaw-dropping, time-saving, productive set of tools.  And thanks Dan Allen for helping to evangelize the open source way as done by JBoss.