All,
I am at JAOO in Denmark. Its been a pretty good conference and
Geronimo got a pretty good showing. I wanted to let you know what
was happening here and provide some feedback from the users as we
continue to define the 1.2 release.
Bill and Jacek presented and gave a demo and I also had a 45 minute
talk. We were in the Enterprise Open Source track. Other
participants in the Open Source track was Jeff and Tom from Eclipse
presenting on Equinox (OSGi). Rod Johnson presented for Spring as
well. I missed the first presentation of the morning due to Jet lag :
( There was also a panel discussion on Open Source in the Enterprise.
Overall the Geronimo presentations went well. The first session was
given by Bill and Jacek and was well attended. I think there were
over 60 people in the room and it was standing room only. They went
through Geronimo and spent a good deal of time on the console as well
as the Eclipse integration. The folks really liked it.
Unfortunately, I don't think there were any people that had used
Geronimo in the session but everyone had heard about it.
I got to go next and had to do a bit of slide shuffling as the
schedule changed and I was now following Bill and Jacek. The
presentation went well and we got some god questions. I covered a
more specific focus on 1.1.1 and the plugin architecture. The folks
in the presentation (I think there were 30 - 40) liked the ideas in
Geronimo. We discussed the plugins and at least for them (as
developers) they didn't see a huge benefit to them. Although, they
liked the idea of installing the LifeRay portal in a simple manner.
At least in the companies they represented that didn't seem
compelling to them for the projects they were working on. They
really liked Little-G and the modular concept of the server. There
were also the questions about when will we have JEE 5 support or a
beta. This year was the answer they were expecting.
The OSGi guys also had a standing room only audience. They demoed
there stuff well and it seemed to resonate with the crowd...many of
them from the Geronimo talk. Apparently, at least at JAOO, people
really liked it. Jeff demoed an OSGi enabled Jetty and showed how it
just plugged into the framework and simplified web development. That
seemed to get some oohs and ahhhs.
Apart from that we had the panel discussion which included myself,
Jeff, Tom, Bill, Jacek and Rod. There were a number of questions
that were hot from a content perspective. Folks wanted to know if
the JCP was going to be relevant and if Open Source was going to take
over. There were also questions about how we (some of the
consultants in the crowd) could get their customers to use more Open
Source. This discussion centered around the support issue and also
discussed project quality relative to commercial offerings (closed
source). At least from an enterprise perspective it seems that the
consultants in the audience were having some difficulty getting their
customers to use Open Source in production. There were also some
questions specifically about Geronimo. One of them was how was RTC
working out :-) We talked about the move back to CTR and how were
communicating better as a result of RTC. The final comment (not
really a question) was, "I would use Geronimo but it is way too hard
to configure."
All in all not anything we don't know but I wanted to provide the
feedback from the trenches. Clearly people have heard about Geronimo
but it doesn't have the broad user community we're working toward.
I'm optimistic that we're going to get there.
The net result from my conversations was:
Java 1.5
JEE 5.0 soon
Simpler to use
More activity on the website; it doesn't change enough.
That's it for now...ttyl.
Matt Hogstrom
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
