Oh yes! It’s that time of the year again. It’s community time – this year in Frascati, Italy.

As usual its late September, so time to gather again to see what exciting new developments are brewing in the community. From reading the talk announcements, it seems we will have another full scheduled packed with new projects, field reports from the trenches and the usual sharing of ideas, techniques and general chatter.

Surely, that is something that Twitter, IRC and Blogs or a Forum can never do. Random talks to random people that spark random thoughts that ignite random brain cells.

Back in June I wrote a posting on how to create your own report viewer for the Pentaho BI-Server. That article sparked quite some interest. Seems that many people feel the pain of working with a monolithic GWT application. My personal favourite bugger is the 4 minutes compile time each time I make a change. What is yours?

On Saturday I will give an 30 minutes talk about ways to retire the GWT viewer in favour of a better, more lightweight solution. Thanks to Jordan, the talk will contain amazing live code! It will contain XML. It may contain pixies and dragons. It will not contain XUL nor GWT.

Well, as a full-time code wrestler for Pentaho reporting and the Pentaho Report Designer I do not experience the adrenaline rush caused by real world projects. So I’ll be like Mr. Vampire – let me suck you dry for feedback, for things that did work well over the last year, and things that may not work well. And hey, hearing any feedback is good. It shows that all the code written does make a positive difference – not just for our sales team but for real world people with real world problems to solve.

In that way, I do look forward to all the talks. And – yes, I admit it – the Italian wine and Galliano and Grappa!