It was a beautiful day to start with, but rain and thunderstorms did mess with the barbeque planning Germans are famous for. So, lots of people attended Web Montag yesterday!

Darren Cooper opened Web Montag this time. He repeated a few times “1st of September”, which is the next meeting in Frankfurt. For next events he really want to see more non-technical presentations. I think that’s indeed a good thing. Darren also got some good jokes, seriously!

Andreas Demmer was first speaker, talking about Presentation Zen. It made us, the other speakers look bad afterwards.. just kidding! I knew bits and pieces about this approach for doing presentations, but it’s what it is: an approach, not a method. I still can learn lots.

My talk was about MySQL Proxy, but to be honest it went not well. First of all, my cold was still there, speaking through the nose. Additionally, I have a terrible buzzing in my left ear making my voice irritating me and I was looking to much for the German words. I’m not really preparing enough for these short talks. Anyway, there will be video about it!

The important links are:

• http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Proxy
• http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/
• http://jan.kneschke.de/
• http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/

Michael Vog talked about the Google Web Toolkit or GWT. This was probably nice of the Web Designers in the audience. Particular interesting for me was the talk about Selenium IDE by Thorsten Biedenkapp. I’ll probably never use it, but I made something similar in my previous job testing regressions and errors in websites. The last speaker, Sebastian Fastner, introduced the audience to OSGi. So, quite some Java stuff that evening!

Next Web Montag in Frankfurt am Main is on 1st September 2008, and if all goes well the following is on 1st December. Hopefully more talkers will be present, and not doing to much technical stuff. Maybe some ‘tracks’ can be introduced, but that might it make to complex again.

Was a nice evening, hope everyone enjoyed and learned something. Or at least got interested in checking out more stuff!