JBoss World Orlando - Thursday

Introduction into JBoss Drools and the Business Rules Management System (BRMS) by Mark Proctor was the first session I attended.

Drools/JBoss rules is really cool. The web based BRMS system looks very nice, and offloading the maintenance to the business users is a must anyway. I'll be using this soon.

I found the keynote by Vefim Natis from Gartner interesting. Although I am way tired of hearing about SOA I still got a lot out of his talk. Some of his points :

• Gartner's hype cycle currently puts SOA entering mainstream acceptance.
• SOA is primarily about business modeling : identifying the business components that need to be developed as software.
• Establishment of an Integration/SOA Competency Center (ICC) is the barometer of success
• Heterogenous software/environments are not only necessary, but should be regarded as a goal.

The Hibernate Search session was impressive. Emmanuel Bernard, the project's team lead was the presenter. I didn't have a lot of experience using Lucene (one project a few years ago), but it looked like they've done a nice job wrapping Lucene and providing an API that should be familiar to Hibernate users.