Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the JAX conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. JAX is one of Europe’s largest Java conferences, with over 2,000 attendees. The topic was The Future of Enterprise Java, and I expanded on the themes of my recent blog of predictions, going into more detail about the implications of Java EE 6 and the future of the application server.
I’ve uploaded the slides, which include 8 predictions for an interesting period in the evolution of enterprise Java. This is the first time I've referred to Joseph Stalin, Monica Lewinsky and Monty Python in the same presentation.
JAX was an enjoyable experience overall, with excellent speakers from both Europe and North America and great questions from attendees. The SpringSource booth looked great as always, and it was good to see so many attendees. And, of course, German beer tastes as good as ever!
This seems to be the most active time of year for conferences. In the last few weeks I’ve spoken at QCon in London and the ServerSide in Vegas, and I have several more conferences coming up:

• JavaOne. I’ll be speaking on Spring 2.5 (I’m giving the session twice, as there is so much interest), Ben Alex will take about Spring Security and Dave Syer about Spring Batch. SpringSource will have its biggest ever presence at JavaOne. Come to our booth to meet the ultimate Spring experts, and see demos of SpringSource Tool Suite, SpringSource Application Management Suite and other SpringSource Enterprise technologies.
• JAOO Sydney (June 2-3): I’ve spoken several times at the Sydney JUG (the first time, nearly 10 years ago, about JSP 0.92 IIRC) and the Sydney Spring Users Group, but this is the first time I’ll have spoken at a conference in Sydney. It’s exciting to see a major conference coming to Sydney.
• SpringOne in Antwerp, Belgium (June 11-12). With all the recent releases in the Spring Portfolio, this should be a great show.
• Jazoon, in Zurich (June 23-26). I’m giving a keynote, again on the big picture for the industry.

I hope to see you at at least one of these events!