Day 1, Sunday, started the night before for those attending the NetBeans Party at Johnny Foley's:

Invitations had been sent out prior to the party to all speakers for NetBeans Day, as well as speakers in JavaOne sessions where NetBeans is going to be used. That turns out to be around 40 people, who hung out until quite late, with snacks and drinks.

Next day, NetBeans Day had most sessions with completely packed rooms, which means there were around 300 people! Panel discussions around central themes in the NetBeans ecosystem (Java EE, JavaFX, and NetBeans Platform) were held, which resulted in a whole bunch of people up on stage throughout the day, such as this group of speakers in the Java EE session:

From left to right above you see Sean Comerford from ESPN.com, John Yeary the Java EE panel moderator and JUG lead from Greenville, Cagatay Civici the PrimeFaces lead developer, Glenn Holmer long time NetBeans enthusiast (more on him below) from the Weyco Group, and NetBeans/Java EE book author David Heffelfinger.

There were panels just like the above for JavaFX and the NetBeans Platform too, with very interesting and dynamic talks, such as one by JavaFX book authors Gail and Paul Anderson, who showed off this brilliant JavaFX/NetBeans Platform mashup:

NetBeans Day ended with a good discussion about how to get involved in the NetBeans community, wrapping up with an award ceremony with two very special NetBeans community awards:

Then everyone caught buses to the Masonic Auditorium, where 4 hours of keynotes took place. This is what the room looked like:

The 4 hours ended with a very well received HTML5/NetBeans demo, showing of NetBeans IDE 7.3 features, by NetBeans director John Ceccarelli. And I liked this slide during an earlier keynote session by Oracle VP Hasan Rizvi:

There was really a lot of love for NetBeans during the JavaOne keynote sessions and I don't remember hearing any other IDE being mentioned, in any way at all. Next there was the Duke's Choice Award ceremony, outside the Hilton in a cool lounge area, where, among others, Timon and Angelo from the NetBeans Platform community received their awards for AgroSense and MICE. In between all of the above, I met very many friends from previous conferences, as well as several new ones. It was clearly a great start to the conference. Looking forward to what the rest of the week will bring!