Attending a WAS V6.1 STEW in Chicago

I’ve flown out of Montreal today at noon to spend the next 3 days locked up in a lab, where with about 20 other WebSphere geeks, I’ll take a first look at WebSphere Application Server V6.1, which was announced last week.

This is my first STEW (which stands for Software Technical Enablement Workshop) attendance, although I’ve done one in the past, but only remotely (phone/web conferencing). For the labs, we need to provide a Thinkpad with 2Gb RAM (that’s the max it can hold anyway) and at least 20Gb of free HDD (that’s easy, I’ve got 2 x 80Gb in mine).

We’ll be using VMware images which should make it much faster to get going, as the software will be pre-installed, reducing the potential for installation problems.

By the way, chances are if you read this blog, you already know what WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is. But in the unlikely event you didn’t know, I just noticed we added some very nice and concise Flash-based animations explaining the basics of our app server. If not for you, maybe you can send them out to colleagues/management…