Tonight I headed down to the Springs for the first meeting of the Colorado Springs Open Source Software Meetup Group. I learned about the group from this post on the Atlassian developer blog. Though it was a bit slow tonight, overall it was a good event and I think it will develop into a solid user group. My only concern is that the topic is too broad to successfully satisfy everyone’s interest. Tonight’s speaker was Kirstan Vandersluis who demoed the open source data integration platform XAware. There seems to be a lot of momentum in the commercially backed open source BI/EAI space lately with others including Pentaho and Apatar.

I walked away tonight with a free license of Intellij IDEA so thanks to Dave Booth from Jetbrains for the free swag! Definitely my favorite IDE, and I was actually in need of a license! And thanks TEKsystems for the food and the other sponsors as well!

I’m scheduled to present on Grails in May so if you’re in the area feel free to come heckle! Wow, four sentences ending in exclamation points (make that five)!