Radisson Hotel Calgary Airport
September 25 - 27, 2009 - Calgary, Alberta
This conference will focus on the latest technologies and best practices emerging in the enterprise software development space. Our speakers are authors, consultants, open source developers, and recognized industry experts. NFJS brings a high quality conference to your city, making the event accessible not only to senior engineers, but to the whole team.
What can you expect to gain at this NFJS tour event? The event will include:
Cutting-Edge Technologies
Stay up-to-date with the latest enterprise technologies. Develop better and faster. With over 50 sessions to choose from, a weekend at NFJS is a great opportunity to learn new skills.
Agile Practices
Software is a difficult industry with very high rates of failure. Agile practices such as: Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Code Quality Measures, and Team Building methods stabilize your processes and improve quality, allowing teams to work better and faster. Our speakers provide fresh ideas to help overcome the challenges you face every day.
Peer Exchange
Do you want to solve a problem? Get a fresh opinion. Few developer problems are truly new! NFJS is a great opportunity to interact with your peers and exchange ideas.
Visit the NFJS web site for more details and registration.
Western Canada Software Symposium
Some changes at CJUG
We've seen some changes at CJUG over the last few months - primarily moving from live, physical meetings to using online meetings in order to save some of our sponsorship money and bring more varied speakers to us. There are other changes coming as well.
Dave King has been trying to retire as President for some years now and it's gotten to the point where he's not going to let us ignore that any longer. So, giving in to the inevitable, Dave has asked me if I will step up to the position of President and, at our last meeting, Glenn Davies of Telus kindly volunteered to take over as Treasurer - Thanks Glenn. And, of course, thanks to Dave for his many years of service to the group - the bad news for me is that I've got big boots to fill (literally :-)
One of the Treasurer's jobs is paying for our various expenses - mostly the 5th Avenue Place Conference Room - which means getting cheques signed by two signatories. This has worked fine for some time because Dave & I have been following each other around jobs, but could be more difficult in future with Dave not being President.
So, I'd like to propose that we recognize three "official" CJUG positions: President, Treasurer and Secretary - all are registered with the bank as signatories and any two can sign cheques. This gives us more chance of any two being able to get together to countersign cheques within a reasonable payment period. It also helps spread the load of finding speakers, organizing events and general group management. Dave has volunteered to stay on as a signatory until the post of Secretary is filled.
So, if anyone is interested in taking the new role of Secretary please email me and we'll talk at our next meeting.
We will meet again on September 9th - where and when will be announced on the blog and via the mailing list. In the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts on how the group should be run, what speakers you would like (or can provide), live vs online meetings, or for that matter anything else, please drop your thought on the cjug-talk mailing list.
Slides and Code from Open Source Debuging Tools
Slides and Code from Matthew McCullough's Open Source Debugging Tools presentation.
Thanks again to No Fluff Just Stuff for sending him up. The Western Canada Software Symposium is
September 25 - 27 2009.
June 10th - Open Source Debugging Tools
Matthew McCullough from No Fluff Just Stuff will giving his Open Source Debugging Presentation.
Open Source is not just a suite of libraries you consume within your application, but now reaches into the space of tools to help you troubleshoot and improve your applications.
This session will quickly survey a wide range of tools across the Java, Networking, Filesystem, SOAP, REST, HTML, CSS and JavaScript realms. We'll look at applications such as VisualVM, which help you analyze your heap and garbage collection cycles of both local and remote applications. Performance and load testing tools such as JMeter will expose bottlenecks, threading, and scalability concerns of everything from Java modules to Web Apps (even ones that don't use any Java).
Learn how web service tools such as SOAPui and TCPMon allow you to inspect your SOAP and REST calls at the data structure level, and how Firefox Poster lets you test web services right from the browser. And when only a raw look will do, we can always fall back on the venerable TCPDump.
This tool-centric presentation will expose developers to approaches to inspect, debug, tune and troubleshoot Java desktop apps, language-neutral web apps, and framework-neutral web services using Open Source Tools.
Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of web services, core Java, web application design.
Matthew McCullough is an energetic 12 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy.
Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O'Reilly, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group.
His experience includes successful J2EE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, financial management, and telecommunications firms, and several published open source libraries.
Matthew jumps at opportunities to evangelize and educate teams on the benefits of open source. His current focuses are Cloud Computing, Maven, iPhone, Distributed Version Control, and OSS Tools.
Matthew resides in Denver with his beautiful wife and baby daughter, who all are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado offers.
Bonus!
There will be a draw for a pass to the 2009 Western Canada Java Software Symposium (Calgary Sept 25th - 27th) as well as 2 NFJS laptop bags.
Details
5:00 PM, Wed Jun 10th
Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest
FYI: NFJS will be returning to Calgary Sept 25th - 27th.
May CJUG: Functional Programming
The May CJUG meeting will be held on Wednesday 13th May between 5.00PM and 7.00PM MDT. This will again be an online meeting held using Elluminate Live.
Paul Umbers will talk briefly about the history of functional programming, some of the characteristics of FP languages and walk through some examples written in Clojure, a new LISP dialect for the JVM.
To join tonight's meeting any time after 4.30PM MDT, click here.
May 13th: Functional Programming with Clojure
The May CJUG meeting will be held on Wednesday 13th May between 5.00PM and 7.00PM MDT. This will again be an online meeting held using Elluminate Live. A link to join the meeting will be posted here earlier that day.
In our last few meetings we've had Nikita Ivanov and Tom Malaher talk about cloud/grid computing - one form of distributed computing. The other form we will see much more of in future is the use of systems not just with two, four or eight cores, but tens or even hundreds of cores. While the JVM itself can handle such parallelism quite efficiently, the Java language constructs - threads, locks, etc - are difficult to use effectively and, even when they are, multithreaded applications can quickly become non-deterministic due to thread interactions such as deadlocks & race conditions.
A new wave of programming languages for the JVM have appeared which use a different paradigm: functional programming. It's been around for some time in the form of languages like Lisp, Erlang & Haskell, but now Scala & Clojure are making it easier to build massively parallel applications and still run them on our favorite (and arguably the most efficient) virtual machine.
Paul Umbers will talk briefly about the history of functional programming, some of the characteristics of FP languages and walk through some examples written in Clojure.
Paul has been in the IT industry for over 25 years, initially with IBM in a variety of roles, more recently as an independent consultant specializing in Internet-based application development. Over the last 15 years he has worked for clients across the aerospace, banking, communications & technology industries ranging from blue-chips to start-ups. He is currently the Software Architect for Elluminate Inc, based in Calgary.
Elluminate Live! Recording: JavaFX
The recording from last nights online meeting with Joshua Marinacci of Sun Microsystems talking about JavaFX is now online. Click here to launch Elluminate Live! and watch it.
