JBoss World kicked off today around noon, with people pouring in to pick up their badges, bags and thumbdrives.

The first sessions of the day were packed and standing-room-only. People were spilling out of the JBoss Clustering talk presented by Bela Ban and Brian Stansberry. Greg Hinkle presented the JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON), which, as announced previously, is working with Hyperic to create an awesome open-source systems-management system. Ales and Scott presented about Microcontainer's new OSGi facilities. Ales also spoke about the OSGi bits of MC earlier this month with Mark Newton.

The afternoon sessions were wrapped up with the conference keynote. Emceed by Craig Muzilla, we heard from Jim Whitehurst, the new CEO of Red Hat for the last 42 days. He reaffirmed Red Hat's commitment to invest in the JBoss division, its technology and its community.

Sacha Labourey reflected on our past, and spoke about the future of JBoss, including the Enterprise Acceleration initiative. Enterprise Acceleration aims to make JBoss as ubiquitous in production environments as it is in development environments.

Then, Sacha lead into an ultimately ill-fated demo. It was awesome while it lasted, but then, as is typical, the demo demons took over, and cut it short. Before that happened, though, Max Andersen demonstrated the power of JBoss Developer Studio by going from 0-to-60 in about 3 seconds. JBDS makes it simple to start a new project skeleton, complete with everything you need, and automatically deployed within an instance of AS managed by the IDE. The integrated Exadel WYSIWYG tooling significantly reduces the code/compile/test cycle. He expects another spin of JBDS this quarter to include the 4.3 version of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBEAP).

Following that nicely, Julien Viet of the JBoss Portal team jumped up and did a quick demonstration of integrating JSF/Seam within Portal using the new JBoss Portlet Bridge project. He also was able to point out support for remote portlets using WSRP before the demo demons killed the power to the stage. The Portal team released Portal 2.6.4 just last week, and expect 2.7 sometime in the 3rd quarter of this year.

The keynote was followed by a festive cocktail hour in the exhibitor hall.

And all of that was followed by the BoFs and Hackathon. The BoFs were well-attended, the Hackathon was not, alas. Manik Surtani, Ales Justin, Mike Brock, and a few others dropped by the Hackathon for a while. Mark Proctor demonstrated the nice visualization, traceability and breakpoints provided by Drools Eclipse tooling during his BoF.

Overall, it was an excellent day, and at 4am, I'm simply worn out. An even fuller day awaits us tomorrow.