If you’re even near Atlanta, the AJUG Java DevCon 2005 is a steal at $75. It’s next Wednesday, May 25th, from 8 AM to 5:30 PM. It’s $25 more than last year’s event, but that’s probably why they don’t have such a hack speaker presenting :). The fee includes all sessions, breakfast, and lunch, and is presumably being subsidized once again by sponsors and the Atlanta Java Users’ Group. Based on the schedule so far, I’d guess they’re either replacing the keynote they had last year with an extra session, or expanding the number of concurrent tracks from 2 to 3.

Sun’s heavy local presence is certainly being felt, with John Bobowicz of java.net on building the Java community, Roger Kitain on JSF (which he is co-spec lead of), and Matt Thompson giving a look at the future of the Java platform. JBoss will be pitching in with a presentation on Hibernate by Gavin King and a JBoss jBPM session with Matt Thompson. The Roundbox Media crew will be showing off how they’re doing some slick integration between Flash and J2EE. James Mitchell, a Struts guru who happens to be local, will be giving Struts best practices, and Keith Donald will be introducing people to Spring.

The only huge gap I see is nothing on non-Struts, non-JSF MVC. Struts is getting a bit long in the tooth, and JSF isn’t gaining as much momentum, so Tapestry (or WebWork) might be worth covering, especially with the recent release of 3.0.

I’ll be there, along with most all of our development team, and based on last year, I’d recommend it highly!