Actually I did this customer-thing already earlier this week ...

Went over to Luxembourg to give a Java-XML training to, well rather utterly clueless people, employed by a very large world-wide consulting firm. And much to my own satisfaction I succeeded in actually getting quite a bit of the (basic) message through. So all in all I guess I met most expectations, how low-demanding they might have been. I wouldn't have called them my most-challenging audience ever, nevertheless it was quite demanding...

Actually most initial astonishment came from my side... In the introduction round I always do they proclaimed:

• to have varying from 2 to 4 years active Java experience.
• to be active in writing EJB's and servlets all the time.

Yet, I had to discover:

• they had never heard from ant.
• nor make, nor the concept of build-management
• they either new about Tomcat OR Catalina, and saw no connection between the two.
• since they were unaware of the Basic Java Code Conventions, they got me very case-sensitive
• were using IBM WSAD since its existence and learned from a recent Eclipse user how to work with it...
• could not place Java RMI...

Basically I.m still trying to figure out which planet they actually fell off right into the classroom, since the term 'webservices'was never heard before.

Probably all of this is just proove that we all live in some modern tribe that self-confirms the members in certain frameworks | ways of working | ...