Rod and I are here in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld 2006. This is indeed a scene. I can't decide if "hubris" or "impressive" is the right way to describe it but the numbers don't lie. They are expecting 45000 people for the conference and the City of San Francisco thinks the show will generate $50-60M in money for the city. Apparently, no Oracle employee is allowed to stay in a hotel north of the airport. One of the more shocking things was that the city blocked off a chunk of Howard St. in front of Moscone for the conference.

In this morning's Oracle Develop keynote given by Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President at Oracle, Spring was front and center. Thomas had Rod get on stage during the keynote and describe what Spring is and what's new with Spring 2.0. Rod also talked about the collaboration between Interface21 and Oracle highlighting:

• Spring 2.0 shipping with Toplink Essentials, the JPA reference implementation from Oracle and how Interface21 collaborated with Oracle's Mike Keith, the EJB 3 co-spec lead to make this happen.
• a number of features in JDeveloper which assist in the authoring of Spring applications
• a number of integrations between Spring and Oracle's application server (for those of you who were wondering, no roadmap was announced for the Java EE 5 support for the app server)
• the Spring OSGI led project where Oracle is actively participating
• Service Component Architecture (SCA) - SCA is an important part Oracle's SOA solutions use Spring

Oracle released the latest version of their SOA suite on Thursday. It is based on Spring.

Thomas also highlighted Rod's keynote talk at 12:45 - "What's New and Cool in Spring 2.0".

Also, Oracle announced the development of the Oracle Developer Depot today. Among other things from the Oracle Technology Network, it has some Spring samples there and seems to make it pretty easy to run examples on your machine. It takes care of all of the things like installing schemas, datasources, etc. ODD / OTN has RSS feeds - so you can see what's new pretty easily via news readers.

What's pretty cool that the Oracle Developer Depot is actually built on Spring.

So, in summary, Interface21 and Spring were clearly a focus here at the Oracle OpenWorld show.