Maven 3 talk in Cologne, by Jason van Zyl

I'm very proud that Jason van Zyl, founder and driver of Maven, will give a talk about Maven 3 in Cologne for the Java User Group, on November, 16th. I'm also very proud that I managed to catch another international high-end speaker for a presentation, for coming to Germany. Again, other groups profit from my preparatory work, and invited him too, now, for making a small side trip there. I will never understand, why there are few to zero cooperations between Java user groups, and where the benefit is to provide exactly the same talk in a distance of few days a bunch of miles away. Details about the talk here: http://jugcologne.eu.

JUG Cologne@Javamagazin

The recent Javamagazin issue 9.2008 contains my article about the Java User Group Cologne. Have fun reading about one of the most active JUGs in Germany.

JUG Cologne - coming up ... !

Last Monday the Java User Group Cologne hosted an event consisting of two talks: GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, with Patrick Chanezon from Google and "Scrum with JSR 264: Order Management API" with Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.

After that great success the next happening is already coming. On August, 25th WebTest will be presented by its main contributor Marc Guillemot. Afterwards beginning of September we will have a double-feature again .. yes, two conferences during one week .. "Spring Security Patterns", with Mike Wiesner from SpringSource and "Scala" from Ingo Maier, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne EPFL.

The autumn is a Spring automn: October, 13th we'll have a Spring double-feature: "Dependency injection for business objects" with Nils Wloka and "Spring Source Advanced Pack for Oracle" with Stefan Glase und Stefan Scheidt. All three guys are well-known Java experts from Opitz-Consulting. Then the next highlight is on November, 3rd. There Stefan Tilkov will speak about JSR 311 / REST and Dalibor Topic about "OpenJDK".

And do not forget the regulars' table of JUGC every last Friday in the month! A lot is happening in Cologne in the Java community ecosystem.

JUGC: Terracotta, IntelliJ IDEA and TeamCity

The Java User Group Cologne is very active in May. Actually we have two events in one week. On Monday, 26th Jonas Boner will give a talk about Terracotta. Jonas is a well-known guy and Terracotta provides a thrilling VM clustering. So it promises to be a nice show. It will take place in the University of Cologne beginning 6.30 pm.

Some days later, on Friday, 30th Vaclav Pech from JetBrains will give a talk at Cafe Teba beginning 6.30 pm. We will speak about IntelliJ IDEA and TeamCity in this very comfortable, intimate location. For the time after the talk I organised a belly dancer .. she will give us a nice performance. The event is open end .. so we will go further to other bars later but will stay in Cafe Teba until 10 or even 11 for sure (having tasty eat and drinks). Seating is limited to 35 persons. Expect some VIPs and much fun .. the regulars table in May is cancelled!

For more details please have a look on the JUGC site. There you can also register for the talks. BTW: recently I gave the JUG web site a little lifting .. now you can find all JUGC facets very easy (hopefully) and without any knickknack. .. and especially .. I did not like the wordpress blog format any more .. and I did activate some spam bots in the past which hacked wordpress adding funny comments. I skipped upgrading to a different version of wordpress, but installed Confluence enterprise wiki now.

San Francisco: JUG community panel session

In context of the JavaOne 2008 on May, 5th a JUG Community panel session will take place at Moscone Center during CommunityOne in San Francisco.

Lineup:

Moderator
Dick Wall: Java Posse member and Java Champion

Panelists
Michael "Van" Riper - Silicon Valley Web JUG Leader
Chris Richardson - East Bay Java SIG Leader and Java Champion
Petar Tahchiev - Bulgarian Student JUG Leader
Thor Henning Hetland - javaBin: The Norwegian JUG Leader and Java Champion
Michael Hüttermann - JUG Community Leader, JUG Cologne Leader and Java Champion
Reggie Hutcherson - Sun's Java Technology Evangelism Manager

For information see here and here.

Dr. Neal Gafter @ JUGC and VIP

Last Monday, March, 10th, Dr. Neal Gafter gave a talk for the Java User Group Cologne ... and it was an awesome one .. to be correct, it was more than one talk. But let's start at the beginning. I met Neal at noon at the central station in Cologne and we did some sightseeing through Cologne. We were in the Colgone Dom, its treasure room, went to the Rhine, through the old town, I did show him some remaining parts of the past city wall .. actually it was a still existing gate to the city.

Later on we met Ann Oreshnikova, marketing director from JetBrains. We had some further hours of fun together in the city. We went to different breweries, the Früh and the Päffgen, had some local beers and local food .. before going to the event location at about 6 pm. There everything was set up nicely again as always .. with a nice Kölsch buffet (buffet with food and drinks typical for Cologne).

At 7 pm the rooms were full .. about 90 persons attended Neal's first talk in Germany. Neal gave his 60-minutes talk about JDK 7 Language changes .. explaining what should be done in the JDK and why .. he pointed out that it is important to do some cleaning up in the JDK with the coming release e.g. in the area of Generics and Switch Statements. More long-term with a target release of JDK 8 he sees some more features in the language to evolve it naturally -- especially Closures. Closures are pretty easy to use, he said, are transparent for the developer and are not really rocket science .. many other languages have them already and for a long time.

Neal pointed out that "reading" is much more important than "writing" .. you write code once, but you read it very often. So the code must be easy to understand.

After about 60 minutes he was done and answered many questions ... the plan was to postpone all questions to later at the evening .. but there was so much hot reaction .. so we did a Q&A part.

After a 10 minutes break then Ann presented some Javascript puzzlers to the audience. Very, very interesting what is possible in this area and seeing some pitfalls! After that Neal asked the audience what they wanted to hear next. :-) He took his Closures talk out of his bag and gave it completely. Afterwards and in between he answered many, many questions and very interesting discussions arised about Java, Groovy and 10000 topics.

We then distributed five IntelliJ IDEA full-licenses to lucky winners and over a hand full of O'Reilly books while doing a raffle. It was clearly after midnight (!) we were done with this "official" part of the show. We then went down to a bar beside for some further beer.

The event itself lasted over five hours -- many thanks to Neal for coming to Cologne for this great show, your absolutely outstanding performance and your time. I personally learned a lot .. also some non-technical stuff e.g. about the working conditions at Google. I knew some facts before, what I did not know was: employee reviews and ratings are done only by peers!! The manager does not have any influence on that. Isn't that great!?! I'm a supporter of agile disciplines but I very often ask myself in projects .. "Why is this called agile here"? It is about selling an "agile" product very often without understanding the core facets of collaboration being in competition with peers. Walking Google's way you have to help your peers, be polite without any vanity fair, accelerating information exchange ... Many projects should do that .. in regular, short intervals.

Thanks again to Neal and to Ann for your time.

JUGC November, 30th: Sun Java Evangelists visit

On November, 30th we once again have a Java Evangelist in Cologne ... no, we even have two Sun Microsystem Java Technology Evangelists who will talk in front of the Cologne community. The first talk is given by Carol McDonald about "Examining a sample Application built 3 different ways: 1) with JavaServer Faces, EJB 3.0 and the Java Persistence API, 2) Spring 2.0, JPA, and JSF 3) JBoss Seam". The second talk is given by Joey Shen about "Java SE trouble shooting tools in a nutshell". I look forward seeing you at the Ebertplatz from 6 pm on. Details here.

JUGC: JavaFX talk October, 16th

I managed to get Sun Microsystem's Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter for a talk about JavaFX for our Cologne Java community. On October, 16th 2007 Simon Ritter is visiting the Cologne JUG talking about JavaFX. JavaFX is a new Java Client technology announced by Sun on the JavaOne this year. Have a look on my JavaSpektrum JavaOne article. For more information on the Java technology outreach program have a look here and for the event have a look on http://jugcologne.org.

JUGC talk with Mike Keith, Oracle, August, 21th

On August, 21th Oracle persistence expert Mike Keith gave a talk for the Java community in Cologne. About 65 persons attended the amazing presentation about EJB 3.0 and JPA. The EJB 3 co-spec lead devided the talk into two parts of 45 minutes: firstly he introduced EJB 3 and its benefits especially compared to EJB 2.x, the second part dealed with JPA. Many questions were asked and answered thoroughly. Mike's slides are here. After the talk I did a raffle distributing books, shirts, the IntelliJ IDEA license and some other stuff.

After the official part about 15 persons went to a local bar having fun and some more deep discussions. Many thanks to PROKODA for sponsoring the great location, finger-food and drinks including Kölsch on tap. Also thanks to Apress for sponsoring several copies of Mike's book, JetBrains again for providing a full license of IntelliJ IDEA and Mike Keith for his time. Mike is a very nice guy -- if you have the chance to talk to him at any conference, don't miss the opportunity. The next JUGC event will be in October. Have a look on the JUGC site for updates.

JUGC: August, 21th - EJB3/JPA with Mike Keith

August, 21th the next JUGC event will take place in Cologne -- the second happening in this month. I have managed to get Mike Keith from Oracle to Cologne, co-spec lead for EJB 3.0/JPA. He will speak about “Building Java Applications using EJB 3.0 and JPA”. Have a look on http://jugcologne.org for details.

JUGC event, August 3rd: SOA and Ajax

Yesterday the recent Java User Group Cologne event took place. It was a conference with three separate talks. Starting at about 5.30 pm I opened the event finding some warm words to the audience and the location sponsor: Deutsche Telekom.

The first talk was given by Dr. Arno Puder, Professor at the San Francisco State University, and his free framework core team consisting of Wolfgang Korn and Sascha Häberling. They presented their Ajax framework XML11. An impressive talk! XML11 allows you to write Ajax applications in Java, compiling them and migrating the Java bytecode to Javascript code. Many questions were asked to the presenters during their 60 minutes presentation.

After a small break for drinks, beer and pizza Owen Taylor from GigaSpaces was the next one talking about Gigaspaces' "spaces"-solution for a SOA-driven system architecture for linear scalable application distribution. Also this talk was escorted by many questions. Because of the thrilling content and these many questions I extended the talk duration from 60 minutes to 90 minutes situatively.

The last talk was given by Max Antoni about his EvaServer. Max is a Ajax geek and he gave excellent insight into the world of Ajax and his own Ajax server.

I awareded the two guys who asked so many excellent questions with a special price. Additionally I distributed some books while asking the audience some questions.

The conference finished at about 9.45 pm after over 4 hours 30 minutes. Wow. I was at the location at about 3.30 pm for supporting the Telekom preparing the seating, micro and this technical equipment. There was not so much work left, they already set up the location pretty well. Thanks! The location is very, very comfortable and suits perfect for such events. Although the JUGC was at the Telekom building last summer already for a talk of Dr. Heinz Kabutz, meanwhile I normally host the events at the University of Cologne.

One intention of the event was having fun again. And it was fun .. meeting the people and drinking some ice cold Kölsch beers. All my work organizing the event paid off again. GigaSpaces gave me a budget for organizing finger food and drinks. On the last day (!) before the event I found someone having a car who was willing to bring the drinks from a local shop. Currently I do not have a car ... thanks, Max! The community does also say thank you to Ulf for bringing the boxes and ice. It took him until the event day to commit on this ... but worked luckily and Max and Ulf, you got the money back directly. Ulf, thanks that you skipped your request for being paid for the fuel. If I would have asked the pizza service for drinks too, it would have been more expensive. And ice boxes are necessary: warm Kölsch is an Antipattern. After the event we went to a local bar having some more fun.

Hosting a JUGC event on a Friday was an experiment. Normally the happenings are during the week. I'm not sure about the result of the experiment. On the one hand about 35 attendants are a sign that it crashed (normally there are up to 100 people), on the other hand yesterday also a big city party was in Cologne, warm weather and still holiday time. The JUGC workshops last year which were also done on a Friday were pretty good received.

The next event will take place at August, 21st. Then Mike Keith, co-spec lead of EJB3 and working for Oracle, will give a talk about EJB3/JPA. Currently I'm not sure where I will arrange the evening. Please have a look on jugcologne.org for updates. Two events in one month -- meanwhile I feel like a full-time event manager.

03.07.: IDE Bash with NetBeans, JetBrains, Oracle and Eclipse

On July, 3rd, the big IDE Shootout of the JUGC took place with the official representatives of JetBrains, Oracle, Eclipse und NetBeans. The event was sponsored by theserverside.com with drinks and pizza. Every IDE had a speaking slot of 30 minutes before a panel discussion ended the happening. The event was the first one world-wide where the leading Java IDEs joined one session and even Eclipse was part of it.
Details on jugcologne.org.


f.l.t.r: Wayne Beaton (Eclipse Evangelist, Eclipse Foundation, Ottawa, Canada), Ann Oreshnikova (Marketing Director JetBrains, St. Petersburg), Michael Hüttermann (JUGC/host), Roman Strobl (NetBeans Evangelist, Sun Microsystems, Prague), Frank Nimphius (Principal Product Manager Oracle/JDeveloper, Germany), Maxim Shafirov (JetBrains, Responsible for IntelliJ IDEA, St. Petersburg), Mike Aizatsky (JetBrains, Responsible for Web Development IntelliJ IDEA, St. Petersburg).