Review of IJTC 2007 RSS

Thursday the 24th of July at 6:41 p.m. 33 Comments

As we were going through the archives of IJTC 2007, we got really quite enthused. If you were at last years event in the CineWorld, you'll recall what a great few days we had - if you missed it, we thought it might be interesting to share a review.....

Last year, 2007, saw the first ever Irish Java Technologies Conference in November following its sister event the Irish Microsoft Technologies Conference, by the by far the largest, most ambitious Irish software showcases held in Ireland to date.

The IJTC 2007, held in the CineWorld Complex was organised in association with the Dublin Java User Group and sponsored by SUN Microsystems, SUN's Irish partners Horizon Open Systems, AOL, IONA TechnologiesHosting 365 (who have since provided great support to making the IxTC series possible) recruiters CPL, local companies Xoetrope and DataEdge, resellers of the CA Wiley suite of management, stress and fault finding products, and Microsoft Ireland who consistently support the Irish software communities. (who have kindly provided speakers at many of our events),

Although the decision to stage the event was made quite late in the day, the committee (consisting of Jake Korab, myself and Luan O'Carroll, pictured L-R) managed to pull some pretty serious contenders to present here in Dublin, and judging by the review forms and emails we received, nobody was disappointed!

As luck (and yes, it was pure luck!) would have it internationally recognised Joel Spolsky from Fog Creek Software, a New York based company providing project management systems for the software development industry, was on a world tour and Wednesday 7th happened to be his Dublin date. Joel was due to fly to Cambridge in England that evening, however, kindly agreed to delay his plans in order to open the IJTC. After his keynote, he dashed to Dublin airport to climb aboard a 6 seater Cessna specially chartered by IrishDev.com to get him to his destination. Never did find out what that flight was like, but I'm sure it must have beat flying in a jet liner.

After Joel's keynote, a panel discussion was compered by our close associate Ralph Averbuch, the managing Director of ENN. The discussion examined the java technology arena in Ireland and what it held in store for those who were adequately skilled up. On the panel were people like James Strachan, Jeff Genender, Guillaume Laforge, Simon Cook, Shaun Smith and Matt Hosanee all regular participants on the conference circuit presenting to the crowds at Java One, JavaPolis (now Javoxx) and OSCON.

The event then re-opened in the morning for two days, five tracks and twenty-three 75 minute high calibre technology presentations....

• David Syer (Interface 21, now known as SpringSource - UK deputising for the 'Stuck in Germany without a Visa' Sam Brannen) on Spring 2.5 (session 1) and Spring Batch, a new member to the family (session

• Richard Bair (SUN Microsystems - US) on Swinging RIA's (session 1) and Swing Max (session 2)

• Steve Elliott (SUN Microsystems - UK) on Services, Architecture and a bit of Orientation.

• Simon Cook (Sun Microsystems - UK) on Java Update (session 1) and SUN Tooling: NetBeans6 and Glassfish 2 (session 2)

• Shaun Smith (who also came over recently to present at the IOTC, Oracle Toplink - Canada) on Building JPA Apps with Eclipse and DALI

• Guillaume Laforge (G2One and leader of Open Source Groovy Project - France) on Grails - Web App Development with Pleasure (session 1) and Scripting with Groovy 1.1 (session 2)

• Matt Hosanee (SUN Microsystems - UK) Project SUN Spot

• Emmanual Bernard (JBoss Red Hat - France) on Hibernate Search: Search Engine for the Masses

• Stephen Farrell (Newbay - Ireland) on Delivering Scalable, Lightweight Mobile Java Technology to Millions of Users

• Jeff Genender (Technology Author and Apache Geronimo Committer - USA) on Apache Geronimo: Leveraging Open Source

• James Strachan (IONA Technologies - UK) on Easy Enterprise Integration Patterns with Apache Camel, ActiveMQ & Service Mix (session 1) and Enterprise Messaging with Apache Active MQ (session 2)

• Kevin Noonan (Calbane - Ireland) on Get Your Applications Talking: Jabber Instant Messaging and Distributed Computing

• Paul Browne (First Partners - Ireland) on Life and Death Business Rules using JBoss Workflow (jBPM)

• Mark Proctor (jBoss Red Hat - UK) on Drools: jBoss Red Hat

• Dejan Bosanac (Author - Bosnia) on Scripting with Balance in Design and Performance

• Bob Duffy (Microsoft - Ireland) on Optimising MS SQL on the Java Platform

• Adrian Skehill (IONA Technologies - Ireland) on Eclipse STP: SOA Tools Platform Project

• and Ronan Geraghty (Microsoft - Ireland) on Application LifeCycle Management in a Java / .NET Environment

Thursday night saw a VIP dinner at Odessa Club which we hosted for the speakers, sponsors, members of the press and some very lucky IJTC delegates who we picked at random to join in the celebration

The event had over 300 developers register and they were not only treated to a fantastic line up of technology presentations, but also had a great place to meet like-minded professionals, a platform to collaborate commercially, and bonus, one to one briefings with some of the speakers.

And so that brought an end to the inaugural IJTC 2008 and nicely set the foundation for an annual IJTC event, and indeed a series of IxTCs. This year's series has included the first Irish Web Technologies Conference, Irish Microsoft Technologies Conference and the recent Irish Open Source Technologies Conference, and designed to open up technology conferences to the wider Irish software population without the need to spend a fortune in terms of time and money travelling abroad.

For IJTC 2008 - we hope you'll come along! Until then, you can keep in touch with the progress by subscribing to RSS, join the community list or follow us Twitter/IJTC2008.

Comments

Add a comment