Java Blogger Meetup at the Thirsty Bear

Last night a large group of geeks got together for a beer and some socializing at the Thirsty Bear. I think the event was set up by Simon Phipps, but many java bloggers attended. Heck, even Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystem's showed up. Apparently, he has a blog as well.

As a side note, I would like to thank the guys from Atlassian for the java.blogs tshirt. The tshirt says, "More People read this tshirt than my blog" or something to that affect. Tshirts are top notch and have high geek appeal.

I got to meet Simon Brown and Sam Dalton while at the meetup. Although, I didn't get to buy Simon the beer I promised him. So Simon, if we meet up again, first beer is on me.

At the end of the night, Andrew and I spoke with Erik Hatcher for sometime about Struts and it's problems. Erik strongly suggests Tapestry so we may have to give it a test drive soon. I saw Erik's talk on Tapestry at the 2004 NoFluffJustStuff Gateway Java Symposium and I have to admin I was impressed. The question is, is it worth learning another framework that most people are comfortable. Regardless, a test drive is not out of the questions. If nothing else, it's a learning experience.