Aaron ran a hands-on Geronimo workshop this evening for the Philadelphia Apache Users Group, and it went great. Twelve people showed up with laptops in hand, ready to get going with Geronimo.
Notes from the workshop: * Installation was painless. We passed around a CD with a zip of the latest 1.1 snapshot and everyone was up and going within 5 minutes. * Nobody had any trouble using the console to download and install the examples * Two folks were quite interested in seeing integrated JBI/ServiceMix. They work at a cancer research center where they do a lot of integration of bioinformatics systems. * Nobody had any trouble deploying a basic EAR, though using the command-line deployer to deploy JMS/DB resources was a bit awkward. (It was not the intention to have people do so, but there wasn't time to package everything properly beforehand.) * There was a lot of excitement about plugins and configuration cloning. The biggest smiles came during a conversation about how you could configure a Geronimo server and have each developer point the console at it to suck down the configuration. There was also considerable interest in other sorts of plugins (file archives, reporting servers, commercial tie-ins, distribution of common open source apps as plugins, etc). * There were a few suggestions for plugin improvements: - Allow plugins to be Tomcat/Jetty agnostic - Allow installation of a plugin even if all deps/prereqs aren't satisfied (just don't start it until they are) - Show size for each available plugin so you know what you're in for - Let plugins include installation scripts that can initialize a database, etc, when the plugin is installed - Support things like "Java 1.4.2 or greater" rather than just prefixes like 1.4.x - Organize the export drop-down list a little better In general, I thought this workshop was an excellent format. More than one person came into it expressing ambivalence about Geronimo and how it was any different from other app servers. By the end, everyone was really into it -- they were working hands-on with the server, firing off suggestions for improvements, ooohing and aaahing over some of the cool features, etc. It was great! Cheers, Erin