Over 200 people registered to attend the inaugural Sydney Spring User Group meeting, which was held on 22 February 2006. As shown by the photos (below), there was standing room only, and several attendees flew in from interstate for the evening.

With one-third of those attending indicating they do not presently use Spring, Rod Johnson's “Introduction to Spring” presentation was well-received and motivated many questions. The planned “Spring 2.0 and Beyond” talk – which undoubtedly will be of keen interest to those who are currently using Spring – was rescheduled until the next meeting.

Two lucky door prizes were drawn during the evening. The first prize was a free seat at our first Sydney training course, which was won by Vishal Puri (of Infocomp). As Vishal had already attended the same course last year, first prize was redrawn and won by Rob Jones (of SAS Institute). The second prize was a copy of “Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework”, which Rod signed for the winner.

Australia's first public Spring training course was also announced during the meeting. The course will be held in Sydney between 10 April and 13 April 2006 inclusive. There is a generous early bird discount for registrations before 9 March 2006, so visit Interface21 Sydney Training for more information.

Nominations were also invited from the audience for a third member of the Sydney Spring User Group Steering Committee, which presently comprises Jayant Joshi (CTO of Iris Interactive) and I. If anyone is interested in joining the committee, please contact either of us.

Future meetings will initially be held on a bimonthly basis, and we will email all past attendees with details. In addition, a notice will be posted on this blog and also the Spring Framework web site.

Our thanks to Iris Interactive for sponsoring the inaugural meeting, to BEA who have kindly agreed to host the next function, and to Rod for taking time out of his holiday to present. Thanks also those many people who took the time to attend the meeting.

Book prize winner

The audience

Standing room only

Rod Johnson and Jayant Joshi

Rod Johnson presenting “Introduction to Spring”