The No Fluff Just Stuff G2One event officially kicked off my JavaOne festivities last night, and it turned out to be the veritable who’s who of Java geekery. I say that affectionately, of course, and I was quite impressed. It’s a clear testament to the sincere interest the Java community has in the Groovy story. Faces I saw in the crowd (some of which I had the distinct pleasure to meet) included none other than: Dick Wall and Carl Quinn (of Java Posse fame), Emmanuel Bernard (of Hibernate and JBoss fame), Romain Guy (of Filthy Rich Client fame and owner of the French accent making occasional, and always hilarious, guest appearances on the afore-mentioned Java Posse), Stu Halloway (most-recently of Ruby and Rails fame), David Geary (of Swing and JSF fame), and Chris Richardson (of POJOs in Action fame). And when we capped off the event with the panel discussion, we were presented with a surprise guest host, Ted Neward (of interoperability/controversy fame (wink)), to preside over the session. Very cool! It was a blast!

For those that weren’t able to attend the event (or are perhaps still wanting more Groovy/Grails goodness), Jay Zimmerman announced plans for a dedicated Groovy and Grails training program that’s set to debut in September and then the first Groovy Experience conference scheduled for February of next year. Stay tuned. The momentum continues to build.

As a final note, it was great to finally meet so many of the Groovy and Grails pioneers and evangalists in person: Graeme Rocher (who has a good write-up on Day 0 as well), Dierk Koenig, Guillaume LaForge, Andrew Glover, and Neal Ford. Keep groovin’, Guys!