Northern VA JUG

[Paul McMahan <pa...@gmail.com>]

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

Re: Northern VA JUG

[Jeff Genender <jg...@apache.org>]

Paul,

Flattery will get you everywhere.  Ok...looks like Bruce and I are gonna
have to cough up a free copy for Paul ;-)

Jeff

Paul McMahan wrote:
> On 10/26/06, Jacek Laskowski <ja...@laskowski.net.pl> wrote:
>>
>> Will we get answers to these questions, too? It's not fair to share it
>> with people out there and leaving us with questions with no answers
>> ;-)
> 
> Well I could take a stab and probably embarrass myself so instead I'll
> just point you at Jeff and Bruce's upcoming book -- Professional
> Apache Geronimo  :-)   Actually a copy of that book was raffled at the
> meeting and I was quite envious of the winner.
> 
> Paul

Re: Northern VA JUG

[Paul McMahan <pa...@gmail.com>]

On 10/26/06, Jacek Laskowski <ja...@laskowski.net.pl> wrote:
>
> Will we get answers to these questions, too? It's not fair to share it
> with people out there and leaving us with questions with no answers
> ;-)

Well I could take a stab and probably embarrass myself so instead I'll
just point you at Jeff and Bruce's upcoming book -- Professional
Apache Geronimo  :-)   Actually a copy of that book was raffled at the
meeting and I was quite envious of the winner.

Paul

Re: Northern VA JUG

[Jacek Laskowski <ja...@laskowski.net.pl>]

On 10/26/06, Paul McMahan <pa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

Will we get answers to these questions, too? It's not fair to share it
with people out there and leaving us with questions with no answers
;-)

I'm going to speak about Apache Geronimo (that I think will in turn be
a chance to speak about ASF, open source and such stuff) at the
Warszawa JUG on November 7th and would appreciate any help to show its
beauty.

Jacek

-- 
Jacek Laskowski
http://www.jaceklaskowski.pl