So, in 2007 I traveled to several places. Visiting Java User Groups in many cities and countries, I saw lots of my best friends Java User Group leaders and members all over the world. I also made lots of new friends, large and small!

During the year I gave a talk at JavaOne (hopefully the first talk ever done by a bird) and was even featured on national television in Brazil. Things were so wild that I had a body upgrade along the way!

I also visited my place of origin, the Java Island in Indonesia. There, they had a 3 meters high banner with my picture in it and I met a geologist when I visited an active volcano. In Indonesia they call me Gelatik, but I didn't see many other Gelatiks around, I spent my time around lots of Java developers!

The video bellow shows a bit of what happened in 2007, and I look forward to a wonderful 2008, together with you!

Lets do more in 2008, I hope to see you around, and happy new year to all Java developers!

PS: I usually don't carry a camera (too heavy to fly with), so I have to rely on friends to send me the pictures they took. Many thanks to all of you that took those great pictures from the video above! If you have any picture of me flying around, send them my way! There is a Flickr group that you can use to send pictures, go to my Flickr page to join!

I visited the Czech Republic last year, where I met the guys from NetBeans and was even invited to be part of the NetBeans 5.5 launch party. While I was there, I visit this beautiful city, Český Krumlov, and talked a lot with several Java guys that were there, including the team of NetBeans Evangelists, and also Joshua Marinacci, that sent me these cool pictures.

    

Then, during JavaPolis, I met a few of the NetBeans guys again, and took the time to learn little bit more about this very very cool open source project.

Roman Strobl is one of the best known NetBeans evangelists. He is also a very well read blogger, among the best 10 at Sun. Want to be a better blogger? You need to learn Roman's secret then!

Now, this next interview is a special one. Brian Leonard is a NetBeans evangelist. But he is also the guy I interviewed most times! I interviewed him at the NetBeans party. Video was too dark to use. I interviewed him twice more at Czech Republic. For some reason, those videos disappeared, they were nowhere to be found on the camera. I owned to him to get this one finalized! Brian talks about JEE support in NetBeans and also about support for other open source technologies in the IDE.

Thanks Roman and Brian. Keep up the good work at NetBeans, and please visit Java User Groups around the world in your travels!

JavaPolis was a great event, and I wanted to learn about open source projects. Is there a better way to learn then to go talk with the people responsible for the projects?

Talking with Mark Reinhold, I learned that JDK 6 was released and that OpenJDK was open sourced. To really understand the importance of this, I had to go hear what Dalibor Topic had to say about this.

Dalibor is the leader of the Kaffe Virtual Machine Project, probably the longest run open source effort to implement the Java specifications. He took some time to explain to me what Kaffe is, and what he thinks OpenJDK will bring to the open source community. Dalibor thinks that JUGs can have an important participation on those initiatives.

My talk with Heather VanCura got me thinking that I should learn more about the JCP. So, I had this idea to look for Geir Magnusson: as representative of Apache at the JCP, and also as leader of the Harmony Project, Geir would sure have lots to tell me about all that. Geir talked to me just a few minutes before his talk and sure enough, he talked about the JCP, and he also showed me how important Harmony is. He was very happy about OpenJDK too.

Once you do like me and visit Java User Groups all over the world, you start to learn that beer is as much part of JUGs as Java. When I saw Marc Fleury serving (and drinking) beer at the Red Hat booth at JavaPolis, I knew he was the right guy to talk to! We talked about JBoss and RedHat, and he even admitted that it was not only beer that was getting over his head!

Nothing beats learning directly from people. Thank you Dalibor, Geir and Marc for sharing your ideas with all of us!

Once Java SE 6 was released, I took my chances and went directly to the man in charge, to ask him what he liked most about it. Must admit, that was not the answer I expected... Mark twisted my little bird brain!

Need to apologize that the sound came out bad, bad, bad... Thanks to my good friend Daniel Steinberg, that helped make it less bad, and saved this precious interview!

Hearing Mark say that the community will decide the future of Java 7, who could I go after to learn what that means? Right there at JavaPolis I met this pretty, smart lady, Heather VanCura. Manager of the JCP Program Office, she knows the inside out of the place where the future of Java is discussed. Heather was very nice explaining some of the changes the JCP is going trough. She even mentioned how Java User Groups can help!

JavaPolis is this cool place where you can meet many Java User Group guys, and also some of the best Java people in the planet! Thank you Mark and Heather, it was a plasure meeting face to face with you!