The first ever The Rich Web Experience 2007 just got over and I enjoyed participating in the conference.

This conference is part of No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium series and truly lived up to it's name and these are some of my reasons:

• There indeed was no "fluff", just real meaty talks full of "stuff".
• This indeed was an "experience" - not just a conference. Everything ranging from the
  • Courteous Conference staff
  • Geeky attendees (we love them!)
  • Quality of food (one of the best conference foods, probably THE best - only comparable to Google Developer Day)
  • Daily Raffles (an iPhone every lunch and dinner, an iMac on the 2nd day & for the best speaker and other giveaways)
  • Great goodies for each attendee (a Wii or $250 Amazon certificate - will be shipped afterwards because of "delivery problems" :)
  • Great venue (driving distance from home)
    
    everything was just superb!
• The conference size was small and this allowed us to have more closer 1-1 interactions with a lot of attendees. We had some real good interactions with the attendees and looking forward to helping them out.

At the venue, we asked for Internet connectivity for the desktop machines to be used for demonstration.

For the quoted price ($850 for 2 days) I thought for a moment that we are getting a "really cheap" dedicated direct satellite connection. But then I realized it was just the usual broadband wired connection. Gosh! That was a ridiculous price so we finally used our laptop for all the demos as wireless connectivity was free, courtesy Rich Web Experience.

It gives an impression that San Jose Fairmont is not convention-ready yet!

Both of Greg & Ludo's talks (Project jMaki - Enabling Web 2.0 Application Developers and Web Design for Server-Side Developers) were well attended.

And so was Tom Ball's JavaFX: Evolution of the Java client.

We gave out a new tee-shirt at the conference with the juggling Duke and attendees were flocking towards it. And if you missed it then hopefully you can get it at an upcoming conference.  Any guesses on the "balls" ?

We also conducted daily raffles for a Sun Spot Java Development Kit during the first two days of the conference. The winners on both the days were extremely thrilled and came back the very next day and shared their experience. Congratulations!

All the information about the kit can be found at sunspotworld.com. I recommend reading the FAQ that provides information on the types of sensors and other useful information. The Users Guide and other Documentation provide other useful information to get started. If you were not lucky to win the raffle, you can always buy them here!

Here are some of the demos that we showed at the conference:

• What is jMaki ?
• Several jMaki related demos, samples, screencasts & samples
  • jMaki on JSP (NetBeans IDE)
    • Dynamic Data Loading
    • Mashups (here and here)
    • Inter-widget communication (here and here)
  • jMaki on PHP
  • jMaki on Rails (screencast, blog) (NetBeans IDE)
  • jMaki on Phobos (screencast, blog) (NetBeans IDE)
  • jMaki on Eclipse
• GlassFish

And others will be available on ajax.dev.java.net soon.

It was really nice to meet Jason Lee - one of the first GlassFish Champion 2007 & GlassFish 2 TV Contest Winner. He got lucky at the conference again and won an iPhone on the second day dinner-time raffle. Read his RWE Day 1 and Day 2 experience. Jason, go buy a lottery ticket and you may be one of the four winners next time :)

Jay Zimmerman announced that Rich Web Experience will visit Atlanta in April 2008 and back in San Jose in September 2008. Thank you for organizing a great conference and looking forward to our future participation.

No Fluff Just Stuff is the way to go!

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