Started San Francisco 2 days back, through Washington Dulles, with a stop over @ Rio de Janeiro and finally arrived Brasilia yesterday. The local airlines (TAM) from Rio to Brasilia offered a nice sandwich where as any meal need to be bought during domestic travel in US (even if it’s across the continent). So that was a nice experience! Daniel deOliveira, a Java Champion and DF JUG(oldest & biggest with 33,000 member Java User Group) founder and leader picked me up at the airport. He demonstrated true welcoming spirit by taking me around the city and showing the key places. And again he volunteered to take me to the venue of JUG. It was pretty impressive to know that he teaches Java to deaf and blind as part of social responsiblity program in his company. At the JUG venue, I met Fernando Anselmo – Architect of Solutions of Directory of Solutions @ Politec, a Java Champion, DFJUG Moderator, and an avid NetBeans user, mostly the mobile part. And when in Brazil, you need to drink coffee and that’s what he offered! And finally met Mauricio Leal (SDN Program Manager for Latin America) who is coordinating my visits. I’ve been talking to Mauricio for past few days and it was great to meet him in person. Back to the JUG, I presented on “GlassFish: The Best Open Source Application Server” and the slides are available here. Do you know Brazilian government mandates usage of only open-source software ? GlassFish is an 100% open-source and commercially supported enterprise Application Server. So drop a comment on this blog if you are aware of an opportunity for GlassFish. There were 130 attendees but strangely not even a single question. That’s not the kind of audience I expected 😉 But I don’t feel completely disappointed because there were no questions during Mauricio’s preso (who speaks local language) and other English-speaking presenters. The translators did a tremendous job by matching pace of all the presenters. Doris presented on Grizzly Comet and Simon on JavaFX. A few more JUGs are scheduled so hopefully I’ll see some interaction going. The true spirit was quite evident when tee-shirts and other goodies were thrown to the audience, always a hit! I was also truly impressed by the audience staying from 7-11pm, and that too without any food or drink 😉 Check out some pictures: The evening ended with a late night dinner at Fogo de Chao. I was quite surprised that the dinner was still open at 11:15pm in the night, this is quite unlike San Francisco Bay Area where typically last dinner entry is taken at 9:30pm! The food was good and the highlight was luscious mango. Drop a comment if you attended the talk and liked (or did not) it 🙂 Here is the complete album so far: Technorati: conf glassfish brazil jug dfjug Software Development