DenverJUG

We are pleased to announce that due to the graciousness of the Metropolitan State College Mathematics and Computer Science Dept. we will continue to meet at the Auraria Campus.
For this month’s meeting we will be in the Sciences Building, Room 1011.  The building may be locked so we’ll post somebody at the door to let everyone in.
Here is a map for the campus: http://www.ahec.edu/campusmaps/AHEC3D.pdf.
The address for the campus is 900 Auraria Parkway, Denver CO. 80204.
The building that we’re in this month is South and East of the Tivoli Building.

Please also be aware there has been a change in parking; you now pay on-line if the lot is closed when you leave.

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda and Networking

6:00-7:00: BIRT

BIRT, the industry leading open source reporting and Business Intelligence project within the Eclipse Foundation, is a new generation of reporting and data visualization technology that does just that – enabling you to focus on building the core capabilities of your application and utilizing ready-to-go BIRT technology to add rich information that meet your users’ needs. This presentation introduces BIRT and looks at how you can leverage BIRT to create data-driven reports, web pages, and add compelling information visualizations to your application. We will provide some background on the project and quickly dive into the architecture, key capabilities and how to use BIRT. Using live demonstrations, the presentation takes you through using the BIRT Designer to create reports, data layouts and visualizations, and then looks at how you can integrate these visualizations into your application

About Rob Murphy

Rob Murphy is a BIRT expert and Senior Sales Engineer for the Actuate OEM Group. He has worked in software development for over 15 years and with Java technology since 1997. Since joining Actuate in 2004, Rob has assisted hundreds of customers with the company’s Java based products, including BIRT, BIRT Spreadsheet, and iServer. Rob is also a frequent presenter at open source tradeshows, and has trained Actuate partners around the world.

7:00-7:15: Break and Announcements

7:15-8:45: Reflections on Java Command Line Options

There are many different types of command line options that programs need to recognize. Many languages (e.g.: bash and perl) has built-in processing of command line options; Java does not. The Java Command Line Options (JCLO) package performs this task for a variety of option styles. It also uses Java’s reflection capability to automatically assign values to variables in a specified class.

About Dr. Steve Beaty

Steve has an extensive background in both the theoretic and pragmatic aspects of computer science. He wrote compilers at Cray Computer, both managed a large group of developers and was a software test architect at HP, has a number of active open-source projects, was a professor of computer science at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, and now works for NCAR.

As we have done the last few years, our December meeting will be a mixer/social gathering.  It will start at 6 PM at the Wynkoop Brewery. Their address is: 1634 18th Street Denver, CO 80202.
They are located in the heart of Lower Downtown on 18th between Wynkoop Street and Wazee Street across from the Union Train Station.  Your best bet is probably to take the Light Rail to the Union Station since parking may be hard to come by.  Hors d’oeuvres will be sponsored by KForce and TekSystems. ReadyTalk is paying for the room and some Hors d’oeuvres as well.  We will have some door prizes including a JetBrains IDE, a SoftPro Gift certificate, Zero Turnaround IDE, and an e-book from Manning.



We are at the Tivoli Building Room 329 – Senate Chambers

Please also be aware there has been a change in parking; you now pay on-line if the lot is closed when you leave.

5:30 – 6:00 PM Pizza and Networking

6:00 PM: Hadoop ZooKeeper by Clark Hobbie
(notes uploaded here – 20101110_djug_zookeeper )

Some of the topics covered include:

About the Speaker:

7:15 PM – Data Interchange Formats at Work: XML and JSON by Tom Marrs
Here’s a link to the slide deck on Slide Share.

You’ve seen the ongoing debate between the XML and JSON communities, but you need to make choices in your architecture.

About the Speaker:

We are NOT at the Tivoli, but we are still on the Auraria Campus again.
Please stay in touch in case they move us again.
We are supposed to be in the Plaza building, directly South of the Tivoli in M104.
Please also be aware there has been a change in parking; you now pay on-line if the lot is closed when you leave.

5:30 – 6:00 PM Pizza and Networking

6:00 PM: Requirements and Estimating by Peter Bell

7:15 PM – Engineering your DSLs by Peter Bell

About the Speaker:

We are NOT at the Tivoli, but we are at the Auraria Campus.
We’ll be at St. Cajetan’s, South of the Tivoli Building and the King Center.
Here is a link to an Auraria Campus Map so you can see where we are.

Featured Presentation:

“The Future of Java/What’s Brewing in Java” -Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

Here’s the slide deck from Venkat:
http://www.agiledeveloper.com/presentations/whats_brewing_in_java.zip

Summary:

Java has come a long way, and yet there is so much that’s happening in this space. In this presentation we will take a look at the exciting additions and changes coming up in the next version of Java: Status of the Java language and the libraries, features that are around the corner, JVM capability enhancements, and benefits of these imminent changes.

Transforming to Groovy

Here’s the slide deck from Venkat: http://www.agiledeveloper.com/presentations/transformingToGroovy.zip

Groovy is a elegant, dynamic, agile, OO language. I like to program in Groovy because it is fun and the code is concise and highly expressive. Writing code in a language is hardly about using its syntax, however. It is about using the right idioms.  This talk will cover some nice Groovy idioms.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of “.NET Gotchas,” coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning “Practices of an Agile Developer,” author of “Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer” and “Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine” (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

We are back at the Tivoli in 320 A/B for the August Meeting.

“Software Development on the Android Platform” – Bryan Noll
Here is the slide deck from Bryan’s presentation: Tour of Android

Bryan will be drawing on the experience he recently
gained by releasing an app to the Android Market.
He will share with you what he learned about the
APIs he had to use. This will include but may not
be limited to the following Android APIs:
Contacts, Sms, Maps and Location. Some details
about the process of getting an app into the
Android Market and making it available for
purchasing will also be covered.
Hopefully he’ll be able to share a few things
that aren’t readily available in books and
quick web searches… the kind of things that
seem to only expose themselves once you’ve
dug in, done what the documentation says you
should do, then find out you’ve got to do
something a little bit differently in order
to get the stuff working.

Bryan Noll has been developing software for
nearly a decade now. His technical
experience is in Java, JavaScript,
Grails, Rails and the standard stack
of web tools. He’s done both the
server side and client side thing.

His non-technical approach is to
simply do stuff well – thoroughly
and efficiently – with an
entrepreneurial spirit, communicating
clearly the entire time.

Lately he’s enjoyed getting into the
mobile space by dorking around with
Android development. For further
professional info, feel free to see
his LinkedIn profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bryannoll

“iText” – Greg Holling

Here’s the slide deck: August 2010 iText Presentation

I had to put the code on our Yahoo site due to limitations within WordPress.  Here’s the link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/djug/files/Presentations/iText-Code.zip

The iText library (http://www.itextpdf.com) can be
used to generate PDF files on the fly.
The library has multiple levels of
abstraction, some of which can be confusing,
and the documentation is not always adequate
or complete.

Greg will show an iText example from a
recent servlet/JSP-based project, and will discuss lessons learned and potential gotchas.

Greg Holling is a Denver-based independent
software consultant, mentor, and trainer.
He has been developing software with Java
since it was in beta, and has mentored and
trained Java developers at Fortune 500 companies
locally and nationwide.

Our meeting has moved away from the Tivoli for the month of June!

This month’s DJUG Meeting will be at the Tattered Cover Conference Center downtown.
Their address is 1628 16th St Denver CO 80202.

Schedule:

5:30 – 6:00 PM Pizza and Networking
6:00 – 7:00 PM Avian – Joel Dice
7:00 – 7:10 PM Short break
7:10 – 7:15 PM Announcements
7:15 – 8:45 PM JVM – John Lowe

Featured Presentation: JVM

Slides (and some not in the presentation) can be found on John Lowe’s website: http://www.nandgatetech.com/files/Presentations/JVM.pdf

Abstract:

With the growth of languages running on the Java platform the JVM has become a central element of our computing environments.  Ironically, most developers don’t actually know all that much about the JVM and how it executes code. In this session we are going to look at the JVM itself and answer some general questions: What is actually in a Class File? What do the byte code instructions actually do? What is done in class file Verification? How are multiple cores supported? How do the new generation of languages take advantage of, or hindered by the JVM?  These and other questions will be covered in this summary of the JVM specification.

About the Speaker:

John Lowe is a President of NAND Gate Technologies LLC, a software development and consulting company. John’s area of expertise includes embedded systems and hardware/software interaction. John has been developing embedded systems for the past 15 years including, robotics, analytical instrumentation and medical monitoring applications. He has been working with Java since 1996, and has been attending Java User groups in the Denver/Boulder area for 12 years.

Basic Concepts: Intro to Avian

Abstract:

Avian is a lightweight virtual machine and class library designed to provide a useful subset of Java’s features, suitable for building self-contained applications.  In my talk I’ll start by describing the problems we’ve had supporting a Java-based client application and the various solutions we pursued before writing our own VM.  Next, I’ll cover the unique features of Avian and how application developers can use them to package an application written in Java without a dependence on an external VM.  Finally, I’ll discuss a few of the more interesting technical challenges we faced in writing a VM which is both small and fast.  Here is a link to the project: http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/

About the Speaker:

Joel Dice is a Colorado native and graduated with a B.S. from CU Boulder as the 2002 Outstanding Graduate in Computer Science.  He started working as a software engineer at ReadyTalk in 2003.  Some of the projects he’s been involved in include: a cross-platform application sharing library, a fault-tolerant distributed application server, converters from recorded conference visual an audio data to SWF and MPEG4 formats, and an embedded virtual machine.

Location: Auraria Campus, TIV 320 AB – Baerresen Ballroom
Address: Walnut St. & 9th St; Denver CO 80204

Schedule:
5:30-6:00 PM Refreshments and Networking
6:00-7:00 PM Polyglot Approaches with Ruby, Groovy, Scala and Clojure
7:00-7:05 PM Short break
7:05-7:15 PM Announcements
7:15-8:45 PM Panel Discussion: Ruby, Groovy, Scala, Clojure and Polyglot
8:45 PM Door prize raffle

Polyglot Approaches with Ruby, Groovy, Scala and Clojure
Ruby – Frederic Jean
Groovy – Scott Davis
Scala – Tom Flaherty
Clojure – Daniel Glauser
Polyglot – Venkat Subramaniam

In the first hour each of the five panelists with give a 12 minute talk.

The four language talks will feature common examples along with the
influence that each language has on it’s web framework: Ruby On Rails,
Grails, Lift & Cascade.

In the fifth 12 minute talk Venkat will make the case for when to use
which language. While all the languages can do almost all of the tasks
(they are all general purpose languages), each shines a bit more than
the others in some areas.

Panel Discussion: Ruby, Groovy, Scala, Clojure and Polyglot

The audience and panelists will start off with a discussion of the
examples from the previous session. For each language, we will discuss
why one is better than the other. We expect all the languages to come
out winning, but in different areas.

Other topics up for discussion are web frameworks, DSLs, concurrency,
what is a dynamic language, Polyglot Maven and Ola Bini’s Language Pyramid.

About the Panelists:

Frederic Jean (Ruby) has recently joined Time Warner Cable’s Advanced
Technology Group. Frederic focuses on using dynamic languages such as
Ruby and Groovy to build and test complex applications. Frederic worked
on Project Kenai at Sun based on JRuby, to provide a hosting facility
for Open Source Projects. Frederic is the speaker coordinator for the
Boulder Java Users Group. In Colorado Frederic has spoken at Boulder
Ruby Users Group, Derailed, DJUG, BJUG, DOSUG and CSOSUG.

Scott Davis (Groovy) is launching Closely.com to make real-time social
networks work better for businesses and consumers. For training Scott
founded ThirstyHead.com, that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.
Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails
in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since.
Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two
ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009,
Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and
Grails are the future of Java development. Scott teaches public and
private classes on Groovy and Grails for start-ups and Fortune 100
companies. He is a regular presenter on the international technical
conference circuit (including No Fluff Just Stuff). In 2008, Scott was
voted the top Rock Star at JavaOne for his talk “Groovy, the Red Pill:
How to blow the mind of a buttoned-down Java developer”. In Colorado
Scott was president of DJUG and BJUG. Scott has spoken at DJUG, BJUG and
IASA Denver.

Tom Flaherty (Scala) is Chief Architect for Axiom Architectures. Tom is
currently building an open source release of IDD (Intelligent Documents
& Drawings) an interactive drawing, symbolic math and stylistic editor
application written in Scala. Tom is writing a series of papers titled
“The Scala Way” to explore advanced concepts about OO, functional
programming, concurrency and Ola Bini’s language pyramid layers. In 2009
Tom introduced Axiom’s “A Practical Road Map to Enterprise Architecture”
a refined approach based on 12 core practices for 4-Tier platforms with
Agile and quantitative benefit methodologies. The “Road Map” summarizes
14 years of enterprise architect experience at Williams Communications,
DMR, XCare and Axiom. In Colorado Tom has spoken at DOSUG, BJUG and CSOSUG.

Daniel Glauser (Clojure) is the featured speaker for a night of Clojure
at the Denver Open Source User’s Group on April 6, 2010. Daniel has
recently spent time with two Clojure based web frameworks, Cascade (a
web framework authored by Howard Lewis Ship) and Compojure. Daniel is a
software architect with over twelve years’ development and architecture
experience for companies like Comcast, BellSouth and NBC-Universal.
Daniel has designed and implemented a digital classroom, worked on
large-scale data processing systems for the state of California, and a
high-volume content management system for Telemundo.com. Daniel’s
interests include functional programming, logic systems, and enterprise
architecture. Daniel is a nationally-recognized whitewater kayaker who
recently relocated to Castle Rock, Colorado, and spends most of his time
away from the computer either with his family or on the water. In
Colorado Daniel has spoken at DOSUG, BJUG and CSOSUG.

Venkat Subramaniam (Polyglot) is founder of Agile Developer, Inc. Venkat
has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US,
Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and
succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks
frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of
“.NET Gotchas,” coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning
“Practices of an Agile Developer,” author of “Programming Groovy:
Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer” and “Programming Scala:
Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine” (Pragmatic
Bookshelf). In Colorado Venkat has spoken at DJUG, BJUG, DOSUG and CSOSUG.