Last Wednesday I‘ve landed at noon in Prague, quickly took a taxi, arrived at the Clarion Congress Hotel where the conference well held, registered, went to my room and had a quick last look at my slides.

At 3:50pm I was giving a talk on Building Enterprise Applications Using Glassfish . It was about installing GlassFish, deploying an application, monitor and configure resources as well as creating a cluster. It‘s amazing how the GlassFish team made it easy to do complex things such as creating and administrating a cluster. On top of my slides I showed three demos :

• installing and deploying a simple webapp with GlassFish V2
• monitoring a Java EE 5 enterprise application (thread pools, JDBC connections, JNDI tree, EJB components…) as well as using the Update Center to install a social application
• creating a node agent, a cluster, adding 2 instances to the cluster, a stand alone one and administrating the domain as well as deploying web applications

On Wednesday night we had a speaker‘s diner at the hotel. I was sitting next to Ola BiniJuergen Hoellerand in front of Holly Cumminsand Kirk Pepperdine. It’s always good to talk and exchange ideas with clever people in an unformal way. Oh, BTW, Kirk, thanks for the Tokaji wine (5 Puttonyos) !

The next day I attended the expert panel about the next generation of languages with Ted Neward, Guillaume Laforge and Ola Bini . The topic went from why DSLs are becoming more and more mainstream to what is the future of Java. Developers have to be polyglote and use the right language in the right context. Frameworks are not everything, language matters too.

In the afternoon I‘ve done my second presentation about What’s new in EJB 3.1 . It was a big challenge because at the same time Kirk Pepperdine and Guillaume Laforge were talking about sexier topics than EJBs. Difficult to sell EJBs in 2008 ? Well, not sure about that. The room was full and I had many questions at the end. It looks like EJBs are still hot and not just in the JCP but also in the Spring sphere. In less than 2 weeks I heard twice from the Spring team that S2AP will implement the two minimal Java EE 6 profiles. That means S2AP will implement EJB 3.1 lite ! Stay tuned !

After few other sessions I‘ve met up with David Booth from JetBrains, Stephan JanssenKirk Peperdine, Guillaume Laforge, John Davies… and many more and we went to a restaurant in the center of Prague. After dozens of pizza and pasta dishes (I know, not a very Czech diner) we walked on the touristic streets of the city from bar to bar. At one stage there was a group of 4/5 of us listening to Mike Aizatsky who was explaining how fantastic it is to work for Google : the team manages its working hours (Mike arrives at 1pm at the office), everybody has free food, 20% of their time is spent on other projects (Google’s or open source)… But Jevgeni Kabanov broke the dream saying that one day Google will also suffer recession and the free food will be over. Damned ;o)

The last day I attended some conferences in between meeting new people, talking to some I already know and enjoying the venue. There was around 300 attendees, a very good atmosphere and really good speakers. It was a pleasure to give 2 talks. Thanks to the TSS team and hope to see you soon.