I have been visiting Japan for almost two weeks now, first doing a public training, and secondly working with Japan OSS community here on JBoss web clustering benchmark. I will have more to say on the clustering benchmark effort in a later blog.

But last night, I have had a dinner with a group of people both from Japan JBoss mailing list folks (started by Fusayuki "Miki" Minamoto) and our partners in Japan. We had a total of 37 people crowded into a Japanese resturant to enjoy nabe (like seafood hotpot) and drinks. Food and atmosphere were great. But I was really touched to see the interest level there (not just for JBoss but also open source as a whole!)

Also as a result of last night's gathering, they have decided to start a JBoss User Group (JBUG) in Tokyo. That should provide an ideal platform for JBoss users to share and exchange information in Japan.

Lastly, Japan is probably not known to have big presence in OSS development, IMO. Projects that I am personally aware of are like Ruby and Javassist (and I am sure there are others that I have left out). But I was told in this trip that Seasar, a domestic DI/AOP container is very popular in Japan recently. I have to admit that this is my first time hearing about it.