Javapolis 2004 was a real success. In the past, I've attended TheServerSide symposiums and Javapolis was very similar: packed with technical sessions and full of well-known speakers. The setup was excellent (kudos to Stephan and his team) and the rooms were amazing. Look at the size of this screen!

There were the usual suspects (Mike Cannon-Brookes, Rod Johnson, Cedric Beust, Gavin King, etc) but as it was happening close to France, it was cool to see that almost all my OSSGTP fellows were also there (Ludovic Dubost, Henry Story, Benjamin Mestrallet, Francois Le Droff, Didier Girard). In addition it was good to see Jerome Lacoste and Philippe Kernevez there.

I've had the pleasure of giving 2 sessions:

• Maven: A session explaining why you would use Maven and trying to show Maven from all its different angles. I hope I have been successful in sharing my enthousiasm for Maven. The room was packed (I'd say around 400 to 600 people). Before starting with my session I've asked how many people are already using Maven and I've counted about 20 (but at that time the room was only half-packed), so I'd say it was about 3-5%. My second was "How many are planning to use Maven" and I got a resounding 3/4th of the people raising their hand. That shows that Maven is still in it's early adoption phase and that it has some great potential.
• AOSD: Agile Offshore: The last day was for the business track presentations and I gave one which is my return of experience of 3 years of doing offshore development using an agile methodology.

It seems the tracks were all recorded and you should be able to see them live very soon (I'm really excited to see that for myself as I've missed a few sessions during the first days of the conference and looking at oneself in Video is a good way to improve one's presentation skills... ;-)).

See you next year at Javapolis 2005!