JBoss World Barcelona is finally over, so I thought I'd throw up a recap post on how things went strictly from a Portal perspective.

This conference opened our eyes to what the JBoss Portal team has achieved in just a short amount of time, since going final in June 2005. There were no less than four presentations that were portal related at the conference.

• WSRP - presented by Novell
• Jasper Reporting Portal - presented by JasperSoft
• Alfresco Document Management System - presented by Alfresco
• JBoss Portal 2.2 Features - presented by myself, Julien, and (Zen)Martin from Novell

I must admit, I was caught off-guard as to what JBoss Portal would become so quickly. Sure, I had the random illusions of grandeur that we would be competing against the stuffed suits at IBM and BEA in the open market, but never did I envision us competing with AND beating them at their own game; specially not this early in to the lifecycle of the project. It is obvious now to me that there was a significant need in the marketplace for an enterprise-class standards-based portal. Furthermore, it is obvious to Julien and I, that the momentum for JBoss Portal is here, real, and will only grow - Morale +1, Ego +500. ;-)

The show was an excellent display of how a growing number of partners/businesses are hitching their wagons to the JBoss Portal project. Both Alfresco and JasperSoft had booths and presentations displaying their applications running on top of JBoss Portal. Novell had a hand in our own Portal presentation, conducted a WSRP presentation (they are contributing WSRP to JBoss Portal), and I also had the fortune to watch AJAX working inside their portal. I had reservations about AJAX working inside a portal, after Julien and I played with it in our own skunkworx-like enviroment, but what they showed us seemed to put *most* of my issues at ease.

Overall it was a great show. Unfortunately I tend to walk around with my head up my ???, so I tend to pay attention only to "All Things Portal". I am sure there was more going on at the show, but between the presentations, questions, and meeting all the JBoss folks everything else is but a blur.

Of course, I would not being doing this post justice if I did not post a picture of the Hibernate and Portal team group-hug.

To those of you who missed it, you missed a great set of presentations and some pretty wild nights on the streets of Barcelona (Thanks to Mark Proctor for those). It will surely be hard to top this at the next JBWorld, but we'll try. ;-)

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo