It was with great anticipation that I made my way to Antwerp to attend BeJUG's (Belgium Java Users Group) second offering of JavaPolis. The vendors occupied a spacious hall while the presentations were conducted in spacious movie theatres all located in the Metroplex center. Though the setup was easily capable of handling the 750+ attendees, there was a large gap between the speakers and the audience. Speaking as both a speaker and a listener, I felt that the gap did dampen the speaker/participant interactions. Even so, the presentations were highly informative as this conference attracted an excellent selection of speakers.

Marc Fluery made an unscheduled appearance during Werner Rameekers talk on Advanced JBoss configurations. At about the 20-minute mark into his presentation on Advanced JBoss configurations, Werner Rameekers introduced the flamboyant and controversial Marc Fluery. Marc, dressed as Zorro, jumped out of the audience and then proceeded to hijack the remaining portion of the time slot.

The attendees that I talked were really interested in the topic at hand and were not sure what to make of Marc's sudden appearance on the stage. And though Marc made no indications of any impropriety, there was some speculation that the coup-de-presentation was staged.

One thing is for certain, the licensing battle between Sun and the JBoss group may be over, but the war is not. Rumor has it that someone (or some organization) suggested in strong terms that Marc not be allowed to speak a JavaPolis. If this is the case, then I would applaud his successful coup, though from what I've heard, the audience would have been just as happy to continue to listen to Werner.

For others, they had a choice of presentations that included presentations of a number of JSRs, an entire track on J2ME subjects, as well as the usual topics that covered the J2EE, Web services, open source, and current methodologies.

As was expected, Sun, Oracle, and BEA were well represented in both the presentations and in the vendor hall. Ted Farrell's keynote, focused on Oracle's move towards grid computing, demonstrated this software vendor's focus on this important immerging technology. Sun carried more than their share of presentations. Aside from their involvement in a presentation on the JSR-168, IBM was notably absent from the proceedings.

With the success of JavaPolis, there can be no doubt in the truth of Stephan Janssen's proclamation that "BeJUG (Belgium Java Users Group) is now one of the most vibrant user groups of Java developers in Europe." JavaPolis is a premier Java conference and things look good for it to maintain that status.