SpringOne 2008

I missed The Spring Experience 2007, but was able to return in 2008, and it has been renamed to springOne. During Adrian Colyer's keynote, he posted this hilarious photo:
Yes, that's the Rod Johnson bobblehead doll! I'm so jealous of everyone who was able to attend in 2007. Hopefully they give out something like this in 2009.

On a more serious note, some of the highlights of the conference:

Managing the war on complexity: This was the theme of Rod Johnson's keynote, and I'm glad he explicitly said this, as Spring is truly one of the best solutions to making Java EE web apps simple to maintain and develop.

OSGi: Becoming very popular, and something worth looking into.

Spring MVC: The old Controller hierarchy is going away, and moving towards the annotation based Controllers found in 2.5. Also, Spring 3.0 will have native REST support!

Grails: If you follow the Grails scene, then you know that G2One, the company behind Grails, has been acquired by SpringOne. Rod just reiterated this to let the community know that Grails will have even better Spring support now that they are the same company.