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.

I've started streaming up photos from JBoss World to Flickr.

JBoss reached a nice milestone in time for JBoss World. At the keynote today, Craig Muzilla, the co-GM of JBoss Division, let us know that we've seen over 20,000,000 downloads, now. That breaks down to about 10 million before the acquisition (5 years), and about 10 million since then (20 months).

If this were a constant stream of downloads, that'd be over 8000/day, for over 6 and a half years. Over 300 and hour, or 5 a second.

But it wasn't linear. Since the acquisition, it's been more like 16.5k downloads a day, across our product lines.

Started today in Georgia, I think, as I was still en route to Orlando. Arrived around 4am.

Awoke and joined the JBoss Developer's Conference (the conference for JBoss developers, before JBoss World) this morning. Met the normal assortment of JBoss guys you'd expect to find at such a gathering. In addition to the developers, there were some non-developers present. This included Patrick MacDonald discussing our approach to the build and release process, and Andrig Miller addressing the differences between community and enterprise versions.

JBoss World itself cranks up at noon on Wednesday, and should prove to be exciting.

To help organize your attendance, you can subscribe to the agenda iCal we've put together. I suggest subscribing to it, instead of importing it, so that you can pick up any changes we make during the course of the conference. Go ahead and sync it to your Blackberry, or iPhone, or Android handset.

And don't forget the Hackathon on Wednesday night. I know it conflicts with the BoFs, but the Hackathon runs until "late" and we'll welcome stragglers.

Update: Max Andersen asked for the actual root gCal. Here it is.

I'm packing up the grocery-getter and about to roll down to Orlando to get ready for JBoss World. Rebecca Goldstein has worked her fingers to the nub to ensure that this year's JBoss World conference will be awesome.

I'll be working with Karsten Wade of Red Hat Dev-Fu to produce daily show reports. You can also follow along at home through my twitter. If you're at JBW and twitting, leave a comment here with your Twitter URL, so others might can follow you.

See you there!

As mentioned previously, at the JBoss World 2008 conference in Orlando, we'll be running a Hackathon.

Now's the time to head over to the Hackathon wiki, and start making some plans. If you haven't bought your pass to JBoss World yet, you need to jump on that, also. There's less than a month before we're all hanging out in sunny Florida with the gators and Canadians. The agenda is published, so you can see that you'll be missing a lot if you don't come.