I had the opportunity to speak at the Northern Virginia JUG on Tuesday night and thought I'd share the feedback.
The meeting was hosted by a mid-size IT company in Reston, VA. The meeting organizers did a great job of setting things up and provided an excellent facility, refreshments, etc. There were about 20 people in attendance and though not a huge crowd they were very interactive and stumped me a few times with their perceptive questions (ok I admit that's not so difficult). They were already very familiar with the subject matter -- J2EE, ASF, open source application servers, etc. and used the technologies in their daily jobs. So we focused primarily on what is unique about Geronimo - gbean kernel, plugins, admin console, - and where Geronimo is headed over the next few releases. Like I said, they posed some great questions, summarized below: - When is JEE5 support coming? - What is XBean and how does it compare to Spring and GBean? When and how will it be integrated into Geronimo? What does the 'X' in 'XBean' stand for (I just stood there blushing on the last one ;-) - Several detailed questions about how the plugin dependency system works and the other mechanics of plugins and plugin repositories - What maven plugins does Geronimo provide and does Geronimo provide any ant tasks for deployment, etc? - One person had tried to build trunk last month so he could contribute a JACC module but gave up after a couple days of problems with maven. I told him the build is in MUCH better shape now and to try again. - Just how customizable is the server? For example, someone asked how to go about swapping activemq with websphere mq. - Besides the licensing terms, what truly sets Geronimo apart from jboss and glassfish? - What is IBM's interest in Geronimo and how are other companies such as Oracle, BEA, and Sun positioned in this space? They meet twice a month and expressed some interest in hosting a follow up meeting on xbean if possible. Best wishes, Paul