Eric D. Schabell: November 2011

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

My JUDCon 2011 in London was cloudy with a bit of migration

Great location JUDCon 2011 London
 Well, where do I start? That is the first thought that enters my head when I look back at two days of JUDCon in London! I will share with you my direct experiences and hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed hanging out with all the JBoss Rock Stars.

I flew in late on Sunday evening, as I had a morning meeting that kept me away from the morning sessions where there was a session focused on jBPM5 by Kris Verlaenen. There was also an OpenShift / Cloud track running parallel on my track so that meant I missed all of that.

Once I got to JUDCon it was well streamlined and I held my session on Launching into the Future with the jBPM Migration Project. I asked if there were jBPM3 users and over 1/2 raised their hands. I understand why there are there, so I go around the room asking the others why they are there. Most are also interested in moving existing jBPM3 projects to jBPM5 but did not raise their hands initially, sneaky! I also noted that there were a few Red Hat support engineers that will have to help support jBPM and were keen to see what we had done. Kudos to them for self education!

I kept the session more conversational and person with lots of interaction along the way. I walked through the history leading up to now for the project and demo'ed both the conversion in Eclipse, in an OpenShift webapp we have deployed and in the latest jBPM web designer deployed in OpenShift. I also included HOWTO slides so that everyone can put these tools together themselves in minutes.

By the way, the lunches, snacks and dinner were top rate. Plenty of food and everyone enjoyed the beers and pizza going into the evening Lightning Talks / Hackfest as you can see in the pictures.

The JBoss Asylum team put on a live show for us by recording the podcast as the first Lightning Talk. This was really quite good as the beer and pizza had already been flowing. You will notice lots of laughs in the background once they release this episode!

Lightning Talks were crowded
Finally we got down to business with both Max Andersen and myself targeting OpenShift in our talks. I hit the general note, inviting our first official Booth Babe to the stage (a lady who agreed to help out and got a great free shirt). I invited everyone who wanted to try it out to drop by our table at the front and we would help them install their apps into the cloud. I put a bit of Halloween tint on the initial slide, got some good cheers from that one. Again, it might have just been the beer? Jeremy Brown got up and demo'ed a pretty neat use of the 5x free OpenShift Express instances by showing how to use continuous builds with Jenkins to push to new instances for each feature branch a team would create on a development project.

Max Andersen then gave a talk on the JBossTools integration of OpenShift, including a demo of the upcoming release. This is a great step for the Java developers out there that don't want to have to use Ruby based CLI tooling from the shell. Well done!

We then proceeded to have a bit of a hackfest, working on OpenShift and jBPM Migration Project as we chatted with customers, developers and other fellow JBoss'ians. The next day was spent in the morning watching a few of the JBoss related sessions such as jClouds and configuration management for JBoss AS7, but I had a plane to catch so was on the way home before it all ended.

It was again a really great time, I hope that you will make one of the next JUDCon's in 2012 as you really will get the chance to dunk yourself into the world of JBoss like no there conference can offer. See you there!