LA and Boulder JUG recap

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

Howdy folks,

I wanted to give a recap of the Los Angeles and Boulder JUGs I did this
week.  I presented at the LA JUG on Nov 7 and Boulder, CO JUG on Nov 9.
About 30 people attended each JUG.  I gave my "Apache Geronimo
Unleashed" presentation which is an overview of Geronimo's architecture
as well as a demo of starting/stopping/web console/plugins, etc.

Both JUGs seemed to have a significant amount of interest in Geronimo.
They didn't know too much about Geronimo, so the overview gave them a
good chance to see Geronimo in action.  Most people were very impressed
in the things that can be done in the app server, the console, and were
compelled by plugins.  I demonstrated a Liferay plugin with a mysql
database pool, all done from a local plugin repo.  They were amazed that
the database pools could be configured so easily.  Those who were
familiar with the large steps involved in getting a portal to run were
impressed that a complete portal was up-and-running in a matter of
minutes through plugins, vs hours for manual configuration.

A couple of questions came up that were very similar in both JUGs:

1) GBean IOC seems a lot like Spring...why not use Spring?

2) Time frames on possible OSGI integration, and specifically Equinox.

3) Configurations via GBeans vs using the original products
configuration.  Case in point was Tomcat.  Why not use the
server.xml/config.xml instead of GBeans.  The answers were "Six Of One,
A Half Dozen Of The Other"...that learning one configuration allowed you
to know them all.  However, this was countered that migrating to
Geronimo from Tomcat and learning new configurations may turn some
people off.

Most people liked that they could build their own application server and
make it as heavy or light as they wanted.

Interesting thing to note, at the Boulder JUG, I found one person whose
company is using Geronimo to distribute software to 1000s of clients,
each running a light version of Geronimo.  They said Geronimo was the
only application server that had the flexibility to build a light weight
container, while at the same time using the Apache License to be able to
buildand distribute their own product.  They are very happy with what
Geronimo delivers.

All in all they were great JUGs and it reinforces how powerful they are
to get the word out.

Jeff