The final two days of Drupalcon 2007 were competing with the phenomenal La Merce Festival for conference attendees' time and attention.  Had Sun not paid my airfare to be at the conference I'd have been at the festival catching as many of the 100+ bands playing in Ciutat Vella as I could. 

As such, on Day Three I dutifully presented a session entitled “Industrial Grade Deployment on SAMP” to many of the more prominent developers in the Drupal community. 

The session followed an outline that I think helped establish Sun's relevance to the community:

1. How is Sun already connected to the Drupal community?
2. What has Sun been up to all these months/years since you last heard?
3. What are some Drupal specific Use Cases that are interesting on Sun technology?
4. How do you get started using Sun technology?

The slideshow embedded here answers in some depth each of these questions.  Lot's of other presentations from DrupalCon are posted over on Slideshare.net

Day Four was capped by some updates and insight from Dries, the father of Drupal and spiritual leader of the conference.  Dries Buytaert created Drupal at age 22.  Seven years later he continues to lead the Drupal community and actively contributes innovations to the platform.  He is a PhD student at University of Ghent where he has published several papers on Java performance, and has developed tools and frameworks for JIT compiler analysis and Java performance tuning.  The irony that Drupal is built on PHP is not lost on the Drupal community or Dries.

One of the most important updates presented by Dries was the 2007 developer survey results.  Sun's value to the community came into sharper focus when he flashed the answers to the question, "What are you good at and what skills do you want to invest in?"  Performance, Scalability, and High Availability were areas in which over 80% had little experience or wanted to learn.

Drupalcon was a great experience.  I'm looking forward to the next one, which is likely to be somewhere in North America this coming spring.