Today was the Community One. Not exactly JavaOne yet, free of charge, and mostly based on communities. The idea is to bring different communities on board such as JUGs, GlassFish, Open Solaris, Linux, NetBeans and so on.

Community One is also based at the Moscone Center and feels sometimes like a warm up for JavaOne. You see geeks everywhere playing video games lying on the floor, geeks blogging on their iMac, geeks carrying a laptop in one hand and a beer on the other, geeks, geeks, geeks… and Wonder Women too.

I mostly attended the GlassFish talks. The more I use and discover this app server, the more I think that it is promising and that the others should be careful about this new comer. Among all the announcements and technical sessions, one came out being really important : Sun, who’s not really good at naming things (remember the all JSE, Java SE, J2SE… naming confusion ) has decided to rename their commercial Sun Java System Application Server into Sun GlassFish Enterprise . Thanks, that will help people in seeing the strong connexion between the open source and commercial versions (it‘s the same code ;o)

Then I attended the JUG Leader‘s session. It‘s always good to meet up with guys doing the same job as you which is running a Java User Group . There was a presentation of several JUG Leaders and then questions and answers about how to set up a JUG, make it successful… It‘s really interesting to see what works in other countries and what doesn‘t (Van Ripper was telling me that creating a non-profitable organization in the US is quite difficult, and in France is really easy).

And then we met up for some drinks and food. And I have to say, as much as I like technical sessions and learn about new IT technologies, having a drink with people that you appreciate is something really nice… it makes you feel part of a community. I met Aaron Houston of course, finally met Michael Levin with whom I‘ve been talking about doing some kind of Java event in Western Africa, Dave Booth from JetBrains, Kirk Pepperdine who came to the Paris JUG recently, Bruno Souza father of Juggy, Stephan Jansen from JavaPolis… and so on. really nice time guys.

Tomorrow I‘ll be speaking at the JUG Leader‘s BOF about the three things I would like Java to have . Met you at the BOF