JavaPolis 2004

First published on January 26 2005 and tagged Tech . Java . Javapolis .

For the past 4 years I?ve been asking all my former managers/companies to sponsor me to attend JavaOne. As it never happened for budget or travel restrictions, I searched for cheaper and closer, and I found JavaPolis: with an entry fee of 200 Euro, JavaPolis is ``the Apache of Conferences, low-cost and high quality!''.

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Yes ! I got in !

So first of all, thanks to François, Alain and Patrick who had to endure my incessant e.mails and phone calls until they let it/me go ! :-) So a big thanks to my official sponsor:

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And a huge thanks to Stephan, Robinand the rest of the steering Members. They did a marvelous job, the conference set up was almost perfect !

I’m really enthusiast about this event ! I came back full of energy and ideas !
So what is the best that came out of it ? the best was:

  • meeting new people, meeting bright passionate and communicative people. As I stay at the formule1 hotel near by the speakers hotel, I had the opportunity to meet with Stephan and Robin from JavaPolis steering members and then was introduced to many people, sometime quite famous, always impassioned geeks.

  • exchanging ideas and concepts with people all over the world all fluent in Java, it’s such a fun exercise

  • leading to endless conversation, even to new JSR and sometimes to endless night.
    Yes indeed ! One of my conversations, first with Stephen Colebourne and then later that night with Stephan Janssen, Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter may lead to a new JSR. (cf. my former blog entry on Stephen Colebourne BOF and Stephan entry on the javapolis wiki)

  • "feeling smarter for a week", as I read somewhere, on a javapolis attendee blog.

  • sharing impressions, lunch and sometimes diners and beers with my OSSGTP fellows
    (Vincent Massol, Ludovic Dubost, Henry Story, Benjamin Mestrallet, Didier Girard) with my good old friend Jerome Lacoste and our new friend Robin.

  • laughing with ``Techno Celebs'' around a few Duvels. Unlike Alexis and thanks to Jerome, I have pictures.

  • enjoying geek or non-geek but always friendly moments with Didier and Jerome, in one of the finest restaurant in Anvers, La Bourla and with Robin at Den Engel

  • and the last but not least learning !! Yes the content was there, with not so much marketing fluff. I edited about 24 entries for the 26 presentations I attended. The 2 remaining were too bad (or marketing content only)for me to spent another minute of my time to blog about it

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Here is my unorderered top 7 list extracted http://francoisledroff.blogspot.com/2004/12/javapolis-2004-my-table-of-content.html[from all my entries]: +

  • javapolis 2004 [part 24: Agile Offshore by Vincent Massol]

  • javapolis 2004 [part18 : J2EE without EJB by Rod Johnson]

  • javapolis 2004 [part16: JSR-170 Standardizing the Content Repository by David Nuescheler]

  • javapolis 2004 [part13: Groovy by Dion Almaer and James Strachan]

  • javapolis 2004 [part11: Event Driven Architecture by Gregor Hohpe]

  • javapolis 2004 [part6: Spring in Action by RodJohnson and Juergen Hoeller]

  • javapolis 2004 [part5: BOF : JodaTime by Stephen Colebourne]

For even further reading: my fellows javapolis 2004 trip reports :

Almost 90% of the JavaPolis slides are now available on the wiki and Robin’s currently working on the presentation streams.