San Diego Java User's Group

SDJUG Meeting 20081021

2008-10-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

The October 21st meeting was well attended, by over 30 people. Colin Sampaleanu gave a very detailed presentation on the Spring framework. Spring is quite extensive in its capability to bring together various technologies for enterprise Java applications. Colin only touched the surface and whetted everyone's appetite for more. After a long session on Spring 2.5 and a short break Colin brought everyone up to date on the current OSGI initiative and the SpringSource dm Server. If you thought enterprise Java was interesting then you'll really like OSGI!

The night ended with a drawing for an iPod Nano from SpringSource. We tried a new random number generator which worked at picking the "blank" rows on the sign-in roster! But after several random numbers the gift was given away to David Martinez. Congratulations David!

Until next time,

Happy Programming,

Paul

SDJUG Meeting 20080819

2008-08-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

Our monthly meeting was tonight and it was a good one! Food and drink were provided by Outsource Technical at the last minute so I was very happy that they came through. Of course, I think all the attendees were happy with the food also. I started off the presentation with my usual opening and a request for presenters as our September meeting slot became fully opened at the last minute. I then narrated a video form the first International Autonomous Robot Contest (Flickr ) showing some of the highlights of the competition held at the Del Mar Fair. After a short break I turned the floor over to Norman Richards, Seam Developer, from Red Hat. Norman flew in from Austin, TX, to present tonight and I think the room got a little warm during the evening to remind him of home, just a little. He gave a great talk on "Ten things you need to know about Seam", almost 2 hours worth and the Q&A continued into the parking lot. We also started giving out the "book review" books, thanks Jeremy; be sure to respond to the Brian Deacon announcements if you are interested in getting a free book.

Until next time,
Happy Programming,
Paul

SoCal Code Camp is over!

2008-06-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

The SoCal Code Camp wrapped up today. For me it signifies the end of a very busy two weeks. I have know about code camp for a few years and this one I was able to organize a Java Track using my friends at the UCSD Extensions program. A special thanks to Kent Yang, German Eichberger and Duane Wesley! We put on 8 sessions on Java. The concept started out as a lab for high school students and ended up being a lecture series with some code examples introducing Java. We had 3 sessions on Java fundamentals and Object Oriented Programming given by German. These were followed by 3 session on Java, Past, Present and Future, given by Kent. German came back the second day for a Hibernate Session followed by Struts 2 session. Finishing the code camp was Duane Wesley who spoke on the in depth history of Java followed by MVC, Generics and Threads. With and average of 10 students in each session I believe this was a success for the first Java Track at this code camp. Now I have to figure out if there is a need, or capability, to do these sessions up in Fullerton which is when the next code camp will be in about 6 months.

Kent Yang

German Eichberger

Duane Wesley

JavaOne 2008 is over

2008-05-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

Well, the final keynote was fun! It started out with a tribute to John Gage, who is leaving Sun. James Gosling put on good toy show with the most impressive demo of the Java Pen, cool little device that can understand your handwriting and record audio; should be great for college.

Some of the tech sessions today were fairly soft content wise. I went to the GUI stuff; hard to tell if Swing is trying to make a comeback or if FX is going to "take over". The Java Posse thinks it's going to be FX but I think FX has a ways to go, especially since it is not really out yet.

Need sleep - will post more later.

JavaOne Thursday

2008-05-09T02:00:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe the last day is upon us. Thursday started out with the Keynote from Intel. This was actually interesting and after the talk Steve Corwin and I went up to chat with the Intel VP and get a closer inspection of the chips. Then off to the sessions. I took in FindBugs which I think is a very useful tool; not meant to teach good coding but I think it would be great to keep new code in sync with FindBugs.

As the day wore on it was more difficult to stay awake. This was in the GUI Makeover session; which did a great job on doing present day Swing and making it look really slick.

At the end of the day everyone headed for several parties. At one party, SDC, they had a drawing for stuff and our very own Abraham Tehrani won a very nice leather jacket. Then is was on to Smash Mouth and the main party. It was outside this year and Smash Mouth was the only entertainment. But it was good, if not short. The last real event was the BOF of the Java Posse which had a great turnout!

There is a lot more but I have to get some sleep!

JavaOne Wednesday

2008-05-08T01:50:00.000-07:00

I went to the Oracle keynote and saw their application for monitoring business operations - not sure if they call it that but it was 4th generation stuff, nothing that a developer would code but more of an integrator (some one who would use their tool). It did have a nice monitoring station for the VM, they were using JRockit from BEA - that was cool.

I went to a couple of sessions on cool stuff, JMars was one. A cool application that helps the NASA Mars team analyze data returned by the current Mars orbiter, using HiRISE. A lander is suppose to "land" in a couple of weeks. Another session on Struts 2 - okay stuff. And another on JOGL and planetarium software - way cool.

I spent lunch with the Dutch group who won the contest of the most members and got a Q and A session with James Gosling. And then at 4 in the community Conner at the pavilion James showed up again for a half hour Q and A - way cool again!

Then it was off to dinner with fellow Java Champions and then Our BOF. We had a couple of Sun VPs - Sun Software CTO Bob Brewin and Sun Software VP Jim Parkinson. A lot of pointed questions were asked and no real good answers. But it was more along the lines of getting Sun to be aware and that they will "look" into the issues. Only time will tell, but both the Champions BOF and JUG Leaders BOF came away with the feeling that we may have to do more on our own.

JavaOne Opening Day

2008-05-06T23:58:00.001-07:00

Wow! What a zoo; well it is not that bad but the line for the keynote went into the breakfast room and around the outer wall. I guess they didn't want to open the doors to the biggest room in Moscone until the last minute. But everyone got in and I strolled to my usual position up front and almost center; saying "hi" to all the famous people. The keynote started out with some great break dancing - though I guess I failed to see the connection with JavaOne; maybe it was just too early in the day. The demos were okay, the usual failures of some stuff - including the cool FX stuff. I went over and talked with Nandini Ramani afterwards and discovered that someone had updated the JDK on the demo machine without telling her; alas, welcome to the "real" world. Still she handled it fairly well; and I might be able to get someone from her group down to San Diego!

Then it was off to the sessions and more sessions and don't be late for the popular sessions! Project Darkstar was cool along with jMonkeyEngine. I was also one of the speakers at the JUG BOF and got to say a few words at the SPOT BOF. The pavilion floor was quite busy also and I spent some time at the Java Net corner and listened to some of the 20 minute talks there; mostly in the area of education. I made some contacts with O'Reilly and Addison Wesley to get some more free books for the JUG and started making he rounds to see if there were any product demos that might be interesting for the JUG.

Community One

2008-05-06T01:21:00.000-07:00

CommunityOne
Well, quite the day today. I kind of blew off the startup camp as it seemed to diverge from my main interest which is about gain more information about the State of Java as opposed to starting up my own company. Not that they did not cover interesting thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifopics, the choice between a self organizing conference and one that has a directive such as community one, well I chose the topics that were interesting. One such topic was on what open source tools to use when getting started - more along the line of what I think a startup would be needing. Maven 2 came out on top as a good thing. Check Style, PMD, FindBugs, Crap4j also were mentioned. Hudson and Ant of course were mentioned. I guess it comes down to researching a bit of what is out there (okay that was my job here) and deciding on what fits best in your "company". IOW, there is no wrong answer except to do nothing!

I went off to a "special" meeting about JavaFX which was interesting and of course I can't blog about it until after the key note on Tuesday which is in a couple of hours. Needless to say I think there is a challenge at Sun to convince the developers/content providers about the viability of FX. I don't know enough about the particulars but I know FX needs a focus and maybe the key note will deliver that and maybe in the fall we'll (developers and content developers) will get it.

I enjoyed a short talk about the track bot and Sun SPOT along with Green Foot. Interesting stuff they have put together - along the same lines as the iARoc but in simulation. They are putting together some cool sensor platforms but may be out of scope of the Kids I am involved with.

The JUG talk put on by Michael Van Riper of the local JUG was fun, it is always nice to meet you counterparts from around the world. I then went to the last meeting of the day and shook hand with James Gosling; no chance in an appearance in San Diego this year as SIGRAPH is in LA. But you never know.

Then it was Cinco de Mayo, well okay what could they do at JavaOne?!? Free beer and Margaritas! And a ball that you get inside and run in - see the video as it is hard to explain. Kent Yang, a colleague from UCSD Extension took the pictures. After that it was to the local Irish Pub for the world wide Java Champions party. Okay, I admit, I do let my hair down every now and then, especially when some else id buying.

JavaOne really starts on Tuesday and I need a few hours sleep to meet and greet and listen to what is going one.

Paul

Sidebar - I really don't know why people like the Mac as I seem to have more trouble with it than the PC (laptop wise). I have pictures on my smart phone which the Mac will not recognize so I could not upload them here. My camera mounted to Mac okay which is why there are some pictures here; I'll just have to wait until I get home to off load the phone pictures, or I could email them to myself. It is just strange that the Mac is praised for its simplicity and integration but in reality it is just as clumsy as the PC.

StartupCamp @ JavaOne

2008-05-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

I got in a little late for the StartupCamp key note due to weather but had a nice flight. I was in time for a couple of panel discussions; one on cloud computing which introduced Joyent. During the break I was able to check-in to JavaOne and get the free stuff bag - looks like the same make as last year. The meat of StartupCamp is getting together others to exchange ideas about creating and maintaining a startup company. They are using the "un-conference" methodology as it pertains to Harrison Owen's Open Space Technology and the other site .com

They are now putting together the sessions for Monday. I am also signed up for the CommunityOne conference sessions so it will be a busy day.

XPSD Meeting

2008-05-01T23:27:00.001-07:00

Interesting meeting tonight on Maven. I had heard a few bad things about it and thought it was time to catch up on the truth, or at least someone else's experience. Not bad, I think I may have to check it out further as it seems to be in a place where it might be better than other tools out there. Besides Maven there was talk on Team City and Cargo, both of which sound interesting. Further talk at Rock Bottom about pair programming and BarCamp. All in all, a good evening.
Now, off to JavaOne.

April Meetings

2008-04-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

Wow! 2 weeks and 2 meetings! It was a busy month and taxes were due also. Our first meeting of the month was on Thursday, April 10th; a joint SDJUG and XPSD meeting hosted at Intuit and featuring the well known author Alan Shalloway.

He spoke to a full house, over 50 people, about "Design Patterns in an Agile Environment". Cool stuff to make you think again before applying that pattern. I'll try and get his presentation posted to our Yahoo group soon.

Our next meeting was April 15th; dreaded tax day! But a handful of the faithful gathered for more pizza and 2 very interesting presentations.

The first was given by Barry Ruffner of Nirvanix and their Java SDK for interfacing with their Cloud Storage platform. Cool stuff from a local San Diego company; plus they paid for the pizza! Our next speaker was Richard Elling of Sun Microsystems speaking on JOGL. He demo'd some neat stuff from NASA, project WorldWind, and overlaid his own interesting data about disk IO measurements on to the earth. Very cool stuff from both our speakers.

Now it's time to get ready for JavaOne!

Happy Programming,
Paul

International Autonomous Robotics Competition (www.IaRoc.org)

2008-03-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

International Autonomous Robotics Competition (www.IARoC.org)

The competition is gearing up for June 21st and 22nd at the Del Mar Fair and we have lots of work to do! Let me back up a bit tell you have I got involved in this competition. First off, robots are cool! And thinking robots are cooler than remote controlled robots! A while back when I was teaching Java at UCSD Extension one of my students, an elderly gentleman, told me why he was taking Java - he wanted to start a school teaching programming to kids. Well, after about a year, I ended up being on the board of directors at Wintriss Technical Schools (http://www.wintrisstech.org), founded by Vic Wintriss. As such, I've been involved in teaching middle school and high school kids how to program using the Java language; this is quite rewarding when they get it. We wanted to have the kids do something cool and robot kits seemed to be coming into affordability so we decided to have a competition, but not on building a robot but on programming it to do stuff and the first IARoC was born. We've got a basic web site up explaining the competition http://www.iaroc.org and have a few entrees already. We even have Eric Arseneau on our board helping out with Sun SPOTs, http://blogs.sun.com/eric/

The competition is open to all but only the first 21 can compete, so don't delay!

Happy Programming,
Paul

SDJUG Meeting 2008-03-19

2008-03-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

We started off the meeting enjoying the pizza sponsored by the Cubic Corporation, thanks Jo, and talking about upcoming events around San Diego. Bryan Beaulieu of Sun Microsystems took a little poll about using open source software in the government and why developers might, or might not, choose open source.

Our main talk was given by Wolf Paulus on having the server call the client. He gave several examples on how one might code up a scenario where the server, when it has determined that something exciting just happened, calls the Web Client, instead of clients constantly polling the server. He briefly looked into some XML and binary web service protocols, taking a closer look at the notification mechanism provided by JMX (Java's management extensions) and then demonstrated a full featured implementation of the above mentioned scenario. He also showed a Comet-style protocol and how it can be used with a Tomcat Server and an AJAX client application. Cool Stuff! I'll get the slides and example code posted to our Yahoo site as soon as I can.

Happy Programming,
Paul

First Post

2008-03-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

Greetings Program!

As the President of the San Diego Java User's Group I welcome you to my professional blog - finally! I intend to report on the events of the SDJUG and anything else I do in the Java Community. I may do some back posts of the SDJUG Meetings just to provide some coverage for the current year (2008).

Happy Programming!

Paul