J-Fall 2006 is a wrap!

Alright everybody, J-Fall 2006 is a wrap and it has been a fantastic event! Of course I'm a little biased as being one of the organizers, but looking back on the amount of work it takes for a lot of people behind the scenes to get this party rolling only strengthens my observation. It is such a great feeling when you see a crammed room when the opening video kicks off.

Just to give you some figures: 726 people registered (excluding duplicates and invalid registrations) of which about 650 showed up, making this by no-doubt the biggest Java event that has ever taken place on Dutch soil. With 25 technical sessions and two keynotes, there were plenty of interesting topics to pick from. The opening keynote performed by three evangelists of the Sun Java Technology Outreach Group was a geeky toy show, displaying the power of Java on devices such as Sun SPOTs. This is about the best entertainment you can get to start off a day packed with technical content. After the morning keynote we had five tracks in parallel with various topics. Sometimes very hard to choose from. So luckily if you missed out on something, presentations for all, or most of the technical sessions and keynotes will be up in a few days.

Anyway, if you don't have the patience to wait for all presentations to appear on the official J-Fall 2006 website, you can download the slides from my talk on the new EJB 3 Java Persistence API and project Dali over here. Actually a significant part of the talk was demo. I can't post that here because neither the finished nor the unfinished code would make any sense. The demo was about using project Dali. If you would like to experiment with Dali, I suggest to visit the project Dali website and download the tutorial that is made available. If you're able to read Dutch documentation, I also have made some sort of install guide for getting up to speed with project Dali, using Apache Derby as the database. That documentation is available over here.

We have to wait for the official results of the evaluation (also available soon on the J-Fall website) but since we had so much people showing up and so much enthusiasm under one roof, it will give the steering committee of the NL-JUG a lot to think about. So before long we will sit down and decide on the future of these events, putting in our best efforts to make J-Spring 2007 (June 13th 2007) even better!