Brewing The jBPM Community

Our managers were a bit concerned at first. "Are you sure it's a good idea to have an IT event in a beer factory?". Of course it is...

Last Friday, we had the jBPM Community Day. A rememberable day it turned out to be. We assembled the full core of the jBPM contributors from JBoss and other companies at the Guinness storehouse in Dublin. More then 40 people showed up, of which half of them flew in specially for this event.

The three muscateers arrived. The first thing they noticed was this thing that looked like a spaceship mounted on top of the beer factory.

Finding the way to the room took some concentration.
But most of us made it before the Master of Ceremony kicked it off.
We gave most of the platform for talks to core members of the community. That turned out to be a bulls eye.

Joram Barrez started addressed any performance question that people in the audience might wonder about. Also he showed the value of how easy the Business Intelligence information could be extracted from jBPM process executions.

Next, Mark Proctor managed to sneek in a Drools-spy into our jBPM event.
Paul Browne talked about the situations where drools rules and jPDL processes make a perfect match. Both Joram and Paul are great speakers and they know what they talk about. Thanks a lot, guys!

Then it was time to do some sightseeing in the building.
And to taste the Guinness at the gravity bar (the space ship thing).
An awsome, full 360 degrees view!
After that pint of Guinness, my short talk was scheduled. Next time we need to have someone that pulls the plug when I go over my time limit again :-)

Then we splitted the audience in two separate tracks. The core contributors went to discuss the future of the project.
Ronald (aka Kukeltje) showed how to hold a Guinness so that your neighbour doesn't see it and with the other hand answering forum questions at the same time.

On a more serious note: this is where the most constructive feedback was generated. We had a great brainstorm session on how we can improve the migration path from jPDL 3 to the upcoming jPDL 4.

At the same time, the other people users got an introduction to jPDL from Koen Aers, the creator of the jPDL eclipse plugin designer.

The reception dinner closed a fruitful day.
Then we went down to the temple bar area and the Master of Ceremony found this great pub with live music.

But with strickt rules !
The 2BInternational team met with the locals and showed us that they had more moves then only in Business Process Management.

But then things started to get messy.
So I concluded it was time to stop taking pictures :-)

Oh... and there was a memorable close of this memorable evening. When walking to the hotel, I came across this die hard artist still out on the street doing a perfect inpersonation of Mark Proctor. Awsome!
Amen.