Great time at the Spring Experience

I just returned from the Spring Experience where I'd been invited to speak. I did a session on the new data center support for ObjectGrid as well as an overview of an XTP application built using J2SE, OpenJPA, ObjectGrid and Spring. The conference was very well attended, I think there were around 600-700 attendees which is great. I like nothing better than making a single trip and being able to communicate to lots of customers with that single trip :)

I met a lot of customers at the sessions and got a very good response on the new Spring integration features in ObjectGrid V6.1 ifix 3 which should be public any day now.

I had a good chat with Rod and I think we'll be doing more to make ObjectGrid work even better with Spring moving forward.

The batch programming sessions were very full which shows that just because something is viewed as old tech, i.e. batch, it's very popular. I had people ask about ObjectGrid with Spring WebFlow (works fine), ObjectGrid with Spring native transactions (works in ifix 3) and questions on building ObjectGrid applications that use Spring services and configuration capabilities. I'm going to try to do more blog entries with examples/specific use cases and I'll work on putting them in to the official wiki also.

I bumped in to Floyd from infoq and recorded a video interview on virtualization so that should interesting for some, I hope. Floyd and I go way back and we'll probably work together on some content around multicore for infoq in the near future.

Bob Lozano was there and fun to hang around with as always. He works at Appistry which is a very cool product for organizing grids and running workflow style tasks with existing code on those grids. ObjectGrid would work very nicely with it. I had customers at one session ask me if ObjectGrid competed with Appistry and, of course, nothing could be further from the truth, they are very, very complimentary technologies. Appistry would be a great solution to provision ObjectGrid applications and submits jobs to them or use them as part of other jobs.

I met some old friends from my consulting days and that was great also. The hotel was very nice and the conference rooms were nice. The event seemed well run and they provided lots of cool prizes to attendees also. iPods, iPhones etc.

Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for the scalability expert panel which was on Friday at 9:30pm. Gigaspaces Nati was there as well as Patrick from Oracle Coherence so that would have been fun to attend but I had a personal appointment on Saturday and had to fly out right after my session on Friday.

I'm very much looking forward to doing more of these in the future.

Comments

[Nati Shalom]

Billy it was a great pleasure meeting you in person.

Oh and BTW i enjoyed your presentation. You seem to be quite candid and down to earth a real nice refreshment in our world:)
To bad you couldn't make it to the extreme scalability panel it turned out to be quite interesting. I'm sure we'll have more chances to do that in the future.

Merry Christmas
Nati Shalom

[Alef Arendsen]

Hi Billy,

great to hear you've enjoyed!!

regards,
Alef