Yesterday morning I met Alexis Moussine Pouchkine near the Peer 45 in San Francisco. He had organized a bike tour before the GlassFish unconferences. We were a group of 10 people, ready to cycle through the Golden Gate bridge. Met at 9:30am, had a coffee, put the helmet on and off we went. The weather wasn‘t very clear and it got a bit windy. After few hills we finally arrived on top of the bridge. We cycled on the lane and crossed the bridge under some wind. But it was ok. Quite impressive to cross the Golden Gate really.

We ended up on the other side at Sausalito were we had lunch at a terrasse of a sunny bar. We took a ferry back and hurried to the Moscone Center were the GlassFish unconferences started at 3pm.

It was an open area were the participants had to write on a board the topics they wanted to talk about. Then you would put your name under these topics if you were interested. After a bit of planning organization, people would gather around a tables and talk about this topic for 45 minutes.

I went to four tables were we exchanged about Clustering, Java EE, Comet and Perfomance tuning. It was really interesting to talk to the Sun engineers who develop GlassFish. I was surprise that people would mostly compare GlassFish to Weblogic and not JBoss (or other open source app server). About clustering I explained a bit the different RMI clustering algorithms that Weblogic uses and the ones I would like to see in GlassFish. The engineer teams are really open to listen and get some feedback from the day to day users.

GlassFish is a very promising application server and version 3 will bring some amazing modular capabilities. GlassFish will not be seen as a Java EE 6 app server only, but a server that can host Java EE 6 applications as well as Ruby, Python…

And then we ended up at the Thirsty Bear. A nice way to talk to people around a beer and some food. I got to met Adam Bien , who is also involved in Java EE and the JCP, and plenty other interesting guys.