Devoxx 2008
Devoxx 2008 is over so expect to see a deluge of wrap-up blog post (like this one ;-) ). Even if you are on the West coast, I think Devoxx is worth the trip. Unlike JavaOne, you can actually find hotels for less than $90 per night, decent food is reasonably priced and a full access pass is about 1/3 of a CommunityOne + JavaOne pass. As expected, there was a major JavaFX push. IMHO, It bordered on insanity. Developers are born cynics. If you have 5 sessions and the presenters are repeat the same slogan phases, it comes off a little forced.
As always, the JavaPosse was a blast, though technical difficultes forced @joeracer to be Tor's interpreter for most of the session. Much thanks to Atlassian for the beer.
There were lots of sessions of interest to Groovyists. Guillaume gave a 3hr talk on Groovy and Grails on the first of the University days. Andy Glover led a Tools in Action session on using REST with Grails. John F. Smart talked about easyB. There was also a BOF on Grails by Fabrice Robini and of course my Griffon BOF.
I'll preface the next line by saying that I know that probably no one else does it yet. It would really be nice if the BOFs were recorded. Maybe not with the painstaking effort of the main sessions but there were a lot of cool BOFs I went to that the people at home won't get to enjoy.