Palinca Distillery, No Draculas, Java EE 6 And NotEnoughChairsException

The two excellent organized JUG Transylvania events are over. Special thanks to Nokia (especially Tiberiu) and ZeroTurnAround for sponsoring this event and Gabriel Pop (the JUG Transylvania CEO :-)) for the perfect organization! At the first day I asked the attendees what application to implement with Java EE 6 - and suggested something Dracula related. The response was clear - they are already Dracula-tired and preferred a Palinca (local hard liquor) Distillery (PalincaPalincie). We developed together a Java EE 6 application with JSF 2 + AJAX, EJB 3.1 (singleton, schedules, asynchronous), JPA 2 (inheritance, relations), REST, AJAX, CDI (qualifiers, events, producers) and Bean Validation. I used NetBeans 6.9.1 + Glassfish 3.0.1 without any extensions for this purpose.
The length event was set to 1.5h, so because of the Java EE 6 productivity I had enough time to answer all questions.

Gabriel Pop set the number of attendees to 100. Actually came 120...

The next day "Rethinking Best Practices" was also sold out - with 150 attendees. The room was big enough, but they were not enough chairs. I walked through the code of PalincaPalincie and tried to answer all questions.

The only problem: there were no heretical questions about Java EE 6 - we gave the books, IntelliJ and JRebel licenses to the most constructive one...
The JUG Transylvania community is really enthusiastic, motivated and nice. Got many questions - we continued the discussions (ESB, REST, Java EE 6, architectures) after the sessions.

This event really paid off for me - I got one of the nicest Java t-shirts with duke-dracula ever...
The PalincaPalincie was pushed to http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns (hacks/PalincaPalincie)

Comments:

Glad to hear it was a success !
Good that is was not OutOfRoomCapacityError

Posted by Cristian on January 22, 2011 at 12:33 AM CET #

@Cristian,

Thanks! You are right OutOfRoomCapacityError would be much harder to catch :-)

thanks!,

adam

Posted by adam-bien.com on January 22, 2011 at 08:58 AM CET #

Nice presentation. Best local JUG event till present.
I attended and enjoyed it.
Hope you did also.

Keep up the good work!

Posted by Liviu on January 23, 2011 at 08:25 PM CET #

@Liviu

thanks - really enjoyed your spontaneous questions (like how about maven, singletons and threads, etc.). It was a truly "agile" session.

thanks for attending!,

Posted by adam-bien.com on January 23, 2011 at 11:22 PM CET #

I'm very glad you liked it. One thing I was somewhat disappointed of was the level of audience participations - 150 people in the room and only 5-6 were asking questions. This seems very low given that this was (theoretically) a voluntary gathering of people interested in Java. Then again I guilty of this myself, not having asked any question either. My excuse is that I don't work with Java EE, but I was curious to see the level of technology.

My question would be: is this level of user engagement (ie. less than 10% of the people asking questions) similar to what you see elsewhere? Is is lower/higher? What can one do to have a higher engagement?

Posted by Cd-MaN on January 25, 2011 at 07:14 AM CET #

@Dc-MaN,

the most questions were asked during the second day. It was actually a constant stream of questions.

The participation was average for a short event. In general more questions are asked during a longer workshop.

At the next day more people even more came - what is actually a good sign.

Thanks for attending!,

Posted by adam-bien.com on January 25, 2011 at 09:05 AM CET #

@Cd-Man,

>"My question would be: is this level of user engagement (ie. less than 10% of the people asking questions) similar to what you see elsewhere? Is is lower/higher? What can one do to have a higher engagement?"

I would say: organize JUGs more frequently :-)

thanks,

Posted by adam-bien.com on January 25, 2011 at 09:14 AM CET #