Day one of the conference was pretty interesting, definitely better in the morning that the afternoon, but at least lunch was good! The Keynote was interesting, by Lucinda Holt from Commerce360, an impressive look at being in the right place at the right time and choosing the best horse to back. The first session, on the changes in Spring 2.5, was interesting, but nothing new since I’ve had my nose in the 2.5 docs since the version was released. The second session I attended was on Grails, hugely interesting, and I can’t wait to play with it! The speaker was spectacular, and technology itself looks a lot more promising than RoR because it compiles to byte code and is deployed to a standard Java app server.

After lunch the Ruby session on Metaprogramming was fascinating from a geek perspective, but provided very little in terms of business use for a Java programmer, or a Ruby programmer for that matter. Finally, I’m sitting in an OSGi presentation which is so interesting I’m writing this blog post. Oh well, tomorrow looks to be a little more interesting.