I spent the week at JavaOne, mostly manning the OpenLogic booth. We had a really good turn out, got a lot of potential leads and handed out a lot of t-shirts. I also had the opportunity to walk the pavilion a few times, get some swag and even attended a session.

The first impression I got of the conference was the first general session. It happened to be the first time that Jonathan took the stage as CEO of Sun Microsystems. I must admit that I know understand why I usually watched them as a webcast. I felt a little under whelmed by the whole presentation. It was mostly marketing fluff. I guess I wasn't the only one that felt that way since you could see groups of attendees streaming out the door.

I made my way to the pavilion right after the session ended. I was on the first booth duty shift, and I got a quick orientation on the booth itself, on how to use the lead scanner and on the different pieces of marketing that we had. The pavilion opened and the attendees started to stream in. The day turned into a blur of giving the quick marketing spiel, scanning badges, asking qualifying questions and handing over t-shirts. I must say that we had amazing t-shirts.

I did attend the "Future of Spring" presentation given by Rod Johnson. Rod was good, his presentation had a lot of good information about Spring 2.0. It is amazing how many people attended this session. It was given in one of the biggest session rooms available. So it was me and 800 or so of my closest Java programmer friends. Quite a shock after getting used to the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour where a popular session my have 50 people in it.

We co-sponsored the Geronimo Live! party with Virtuas. LogicBlaze and a few other companies. It was a great party, was very well attended and had a really nice swag bag. We had a t-shirt in the swag bag, and it got a lot of great comments.

I must say that the best part of the trip itself was the food. After a long day of standing on hard concrete, playing marketoids and handing t-shirt, we certainly went out and treated ourselves to the excellent dining experiences available around the hotel. Two meals that stand out happened to be on Thursday. I had lunch in a tea house located right above the Moscone center. This was an oasis of peace in the middle of a very busy and crowded area. It also had wonderful food. I had the moorish tea service. It was a really nice break in the middle of the day.

The next one was a sushi dinner at Sanraku. The food was excellent, and I had a great time hanging with the developers that came to help with the conference. We had plenty of sashimi, nigiri, maki rolls and (of course) sake. I tried unfiltered sake for the first time. It was certainly different from what I am used, but it was good and it is certainly something worth trying again in the future.

Overall, it was a good trip. There was a lot of hard work and a lot of good fun. I am glad that I am on the way home though. It's going to be a slow weekend for me :)