Calgary Java Users Group

Western Canada Software Symposium

2009-07-06T14:55:00.002-06:00

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.

Some changes at CJUG

2009-07-03T07:54:00.002-06:00

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

2009-06-17T19:45:00.003-06:00

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

2009-06-05T10:40:00.004-06:00

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

2009-05-13T07:51:00.004-06:00

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

2009-05-04T07:55:00.008-06:00

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

2009-04-09T07:34:00.002-06:00

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.

Wed April 8th JavaFX with Joshua Marinacci

2009-04-01T13:20:00.005-06:00

Joshua Marinacci of Sun Microsystems will be joining us from Eugene, Oregon via Elluminate Live!. He'll be presenting an overview of JavaFX.

Joshua Marinacci first tried Java in 1995 at the request of his favorite TA and never looked back. He has spent the last ten years writing Java user interfaces for wireless, web, and desktop platforms. After tiring of web programming with several large companies in the Atlanta area he joined Sun to work on Java user interfaces full-time, first on the Swing team, then NetBeans, and now on the JavaFX team. Joshua co-authored O'Reilly's Swing Hacks with Chris Adamson. He also contributes to SwingLabs and writes regularly for Java.net. Joshua holds a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and recently moved to Eugene, Oregon to be with his new wife.

Details:
When: Wed April 8th, 5 PM - 7 PM.
Where: Click here to start Elluminate Live! and join the session. The link will be live as of 4.30PM on Wednesday.

March CJUG Recording

2009-03-12T07:50:00.005-06:00

So, last nights on-line CJUG - courtesy of Elluminate Inc - went very well. We had a total of 32 participants, several questions (both audio and chat) and a great presentation from Tom on Cloud Computing & Amazon . You can listen to a recording of the session here. If you could send comments, etc to the CJUG-talk mailing list we'll see what people thought of the session.

Thanks again, and see you next month.

Next Meeting: Wednesday 11th march, 5.00-7.00PM

2009-03-09T15:53:00.006-06:00

The next meeting, with Tom Malaher presenting on Cloud Computing is set for this Wednesday, March 11th, from 5.00 - 7.00PM. The meeting will not be held in the usual conference room but will be held online, courtesy of Elluminate Inc.

To join the meeting, click on this link. The Elluminate Live! software will download and run via Web Start - make sure you have Java (preferably 5 or 6) installed and allow a few minutes for a download of approximately 15Mb. You can join the meeting any time from 4.45PM onwards.

Comments on the meeting, and particularly the online format, are welcome via the cjug-talk mailing list. Thank you, and see you on(-line) Wednesday!

What is Cloud Computing? Wednesday March 11th

2009-03-05T17:38:00.002-07:00

CJUG goes virtual!

March's CJUG will not be held in our normal conference room but will be held online, hosted courtesy of Elluminate Inc. A link will be added to the blog next week which will download the Elluminate Live! client via JNLP and take you straight in to the meeting - so make sure you have Java (preferably 5 or 6) and Web Start loaded on your machine. Check out the links above for more details on how to use Elluminate for online meetings.

What is Cloud Computing? Every vendor seems to define it differently.

Last month's CJUG speaker (Nikita Ivanov from GridGain) talked about how to more easily use cloud computing resources for grid computing. Of course he gave his own definition of Cloud computing...

But let's step back a moment and try to figure out what cloud computing is all about.

This talk will survey the landscape (cloudscape?), try to define could computing, where it might be used, and demo some actual Java code running on one of the more mature offerings in a newborn industry: Amazon Web Services or AWS.

Tom Malaher is a software developer/architect who has worked for a variety of different clients over the years, both as an employee and as an independent consultant. Along the way Tom has used a variety of different languages from APL to Prolog, but mostly C, Perl and Java.

Tom has been using Java since the "Juggling Duke Applet" days in the mid 90's. Most of his projects have been web-based (e-commerce, content management, portals) with a few forays into thick-client GUIs.

Currently Tom is employed by TELUS's IT Organization, working on a variety of projects supporting both the internal TELUS infrastructure as well as the customer Outsourcing/Hosting service infrastructure.

Grid Gain, Thursday 12th February

2009-01-30T14:40:00.009-07:00

The February CJUG will be on Thursday 12th, 5.00pm - 7.00pm at the 5th Avenue Place conference room and, with a very special presentation, we have the development team from GridGain coming to town.

GridGain’s open cloud platform is a new breed of cloud computing software. It enables developers to write any custom grid-enabled applications or grid enable the existing one and seamlessly deploy it on the cloud taking a full advantage of such concepts like MapReduce, data grids, affinity load balancing, zero deployment, and peer-to-peer class loading among many other.

GridGain’s SPI architecture is ideally suited for hybrid cloud deployment with any mix of internal and external clouds in the same time allowing to develop entire application locally and then seamlessly deploy them on virtualized cloud without any changes to business logic, the code or how it was developed.

Many developers have their first brand-new cloud applications developed with GridGain running on Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure within just a few hours since downloading GridGain - and that’s what GridGain’s Open Cloud Platform is all about.

Nikita Ivanov and his team will be talking about and demonstrating the Grid Gain platform, as well as sponsoring the evening and raffling off an 8Gb iPod Touch. Food will also be available for those coming straight from work.

Let's get as many people as we can along and give them a warm (for February) Calgary welcome. See you there ... and please remember the meeting is on Thursday 12th and not Wednesday.

Twitter Webcast from O'Reilly Media

2009-01-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Twitter matters. This free, nimble, and powerful messaging service is fast becoming an essential part of every smart business's social media toolkit.

If you're ready to go beyond dabbling with Twitter, join us for our new "Advanced Twitter for Business" webcast on February 6. Learn everything you need to launch a successful Twitter strategy for your business. You'll learn how to use Twitter to promote your business, build community, find employees, and research the market and your competition.

More details here: http://oreilly.com/emails/businesstwitter-prg.html?CMP=ILC-orm_webinars&ATT=businesstwitter-cannotread

J.B. Rainsberger at CAMUG

2009-01-05T07:46:00.001-07:00

Author of "JUnit Recipes", J.B. Rainsberger, will be talking at the CAMUG meeting on Tuesday, January 6th. The talk will be held at 6:00pm in ICT 121 at the University of Calgary.

J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger is a developer and consultant who has been a leader in the Agile and JUnit communities since 2001. His popular online tutorial JUnit: A Starter Guide is read by thousands of new JUnit users each month. J.B. is the author of JUnit Recipes : Practical Methods for Programmer Testing (2004), he has written articles for IBM DeveloperWorks, and regularly contributes to Agile and Unit Testing conferences worldwide.

J.B. is recently promoting "Zen Design", his own approach to highly disciplined software design. He asks: "What is simple design? How do I judge whether a design is simple or complex? What are the benefits of simple design? Why not just design systems the way I've already learned to design them?"

January Meeting Cancelled

2008-12-19T09:42:00.008-07:00

Unfortunately, we have been unable to secure sufficient sponsorship to make the January 2009 Careers Evening a viable meeting (given the additional cost of room hire & catering) and so have reluctantly decided to cancel. We will review the state of CJUG finances early in 2009 to see what we can do with our regular meetings.

The CJUG Executive ask our members to bear with us throughout 2009 and please understand that we will be making every effort to keep CJUG going in as "live" a capacity as possible. As always, your suggestions and thoughts are welcome at any time.

Further meeting announcements will be made through the mailing list and blog as usual. In the meantime, have a Merry Xmas and Happy new Year, and we will see you all in 2009.

Back to the Enterprise Wed Nov 12th

2008-11-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

For the last 10 years, Enterprise Application Architecture, JEE specifically, has been advertised to corporations as being the elite class of software solutions meant to solve challenges of scalability, concurrency, performance, security and even simplicity (the nerve!). But if you look beyond the corporate walls of downtown Calgary, into the land of the Internet, you will find very little "enterprise anything". Furthermore, you'll find that most successful internet businesses deal with scalability, stability and security challenges that make the enterprise look laughable by comparison.

Clinton Begin 10 years of Enterprise Java experience, but for the last two years of his career, he's visited the land of Dot-com: startups, venture capital, social networks, dynamic languages, cloud computing and more. Now, Clinton is returning to the enterprise with a whole new view of how to simplify application architecture, while achieving a level of robustness far beyond that of most prescribed "enterprise" architectures.

In this session, Clinton will share some of his experiences and how he plans to apply them to real world Java.

Clinton Begin has built a presence in both the enterprise and open source communities. Having consulted as a Senior Developer and Agile Mentor for industry greats such as ThoughtWorks, Microsoft and Stanford University, his experiences have spanned a broad range of business and technical domains. Clinton has applied agile methodologies, open source software, Java, .NET and Ruby to the development of large-scale applications. He is an experienced author, speaker, and has delivered formal presentations and training from San Francisco to New York City.

Details
5:00 PM, Wed Nov 12th

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest

Groovy and Swing Leasons Learned Wed Oct 8th

2008-10-07T23:21:00.000-06:00

Groovy: An agile dynamic language for the Java Platform. OK Great, but what happens when you use it with Swing? Is there any advantage to building a Swing application with Groovy instead of Java?

I've built a small utility for monitoring a continuous integration tool in Groovy and I'll share what I learned about testing, IDE support: (Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ) and where Groovy shined and where it can be a bit strange.

Presented by Dave King, confessed static type bigot, Java developer with over a decade of Java experience and president of CJUG.

Details:
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest

Registration Opens..2008 Western Canada Software Symposium returns to Calgary on September 26-28th

2008-09-03T18:14:00.002-06:00

Find all the details at www.nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/calgary/2008/09/index.html.

- Peace

September 10th: Agile Methods and Digital Tables

2008-09-02T18:15:00.002-06:00

September's return to CJUG is being hosted at the University of Calgary courtesy of Dr Frank Maurer and the Agile Software Engineering/e-Business Engineering (ase/ebe) group.

The meeting will be held on the University campus in room 516 of the Information & Communications Technology building, and to allow time for people working downtown to get there will run from 6.00pm until 8.00pm. A campus map is available online at http://www.ucalgary.ca/map/index.html - look for the building labeled ICT.

The meeting will give an overview on current research of the Agile Software Engineering group at the UofC. The AgilePlanner project investigates project planning support for distributed agile teams. Currently, the work focuses on digital tabletops for agile planning. In addition, we investigate integrating project planning with executable specifications/acceptance tests. Executable Acceptance Test Driven Development (EATDD), also called story test driven development, is a process where development of new features only starts after executable tests for it are defined. Acceptance tests act as an executable specification. Agile methods are moving from single teams to whole organization. This raises issue of how to coordinate multiple teams and organize software reuse across multiple projects. Our Agile Product Line Engineering project is developing new apporaches that combine software product lines with agile thinking.

The meeting will consist of short presentations followed by demos of the various tools:

Overview (Frank Maurer)
APDT: Distributed agile planning using digital tables (Xin Wang)
FitClipse: Tool support for executable acceptance test driven development (Shelly Park, Brady Lill, Keynan Pratt)
APJazz: Integrating AgilePlanner with IBM Jazz (Jens Kordowski, Shelly Park)
ActiveStory: Low-fi prototyping and distributed usability testing (Keynan Pratt, Brady Lill)
eHome Monitoring & Control (Maha Shouman, Darren Andreychuk)

Once again, please note that we will not be meeting at 5th Avenue place (downtown) this month.

Mailing Lists

2008-08-08T18:18:00.000-06:00

The main CJUG List is to announce CJUG events, plus one or two related events we think you should know about. We send about 20 - 30 emails a year on this list. Send an email to cjug-subscribe@topica.com to subscribe.

CJUG-Talk is an open list for members to talk about Java and the tech market in Calgary. Honestly it's low traffic, but we do post a number of job opportunities on this list each year. Send an email to cjug-talk-subscribe@topica.com to subscribe.

- Peace

June 11th: Ted Neward on Groovy and Dynamic/Functional languages

2008-06-03T12:10:00.001-06:00

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Groovy - 60 minutes
Looking for ways to extend your Java programming skills in the dynamic direction without abandoning the platform you've come to love? Groovy, an open-source programming languages being ratified through the Java Community Process as we speak, is a dynamic language with both interpreted and compiled execution modes, complete access to the underlying Java platform and libraries, and a lot of the features that we've come to love in languages like Ruby and Python. Come find out what Groovy can do for you through this introductory, code-first overview.

Ted will also do 30 minutes on why the next five years is about languages - Dynamic/Functional

Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, four video-game consoles, thousands of books (on programming and otherwise), and eight PCs.

Ted is being flown in by the folks at No Fluff Just Stuff who put on the Western Canada Java Software Symposium each year.

Details:
Wednesday, June 11h, 2008
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest

Wed May 14th: Decentralized Source Code Management

2008-05-07T12:43:00.000-06:00

With development teams becoming more geographically remote or working independently, the centralized source code repository, typified by tools such as CVS and Subversion, is becoming less suited to the way these teams would like to work. Over the last few years, decentralized source code management systems have appeared, and have gained ground rapidly in the Open Source world. So what is different about a "decentralized" system and what makes using one so special? Paul Umbers will give an overview of DSCM systems, then demonstrate how one - Git - can be used not only in the traditional "centralized" way, but much more effectively (even by a single developer) by using it's decentralized features.

Paul Umbers has been in the IT industry for over 20 years, initially with IBM in a variety of roles, more recently as an independent consultant specializing in Internet-based application development. Over the last 10 years he has worked for clients across the aerospace, banking, communications & technology industries ranging from blue-chips to start-ups. He has a Masters Degree in Information Technology and is a member of the British Computer Society, the Institution of Analysts & Programmers, the Agile Alliance & the International Function Point Users Group, and has published technical papers through the IEEE. He is currently the Software Architect for Elluminate Inc, based in Calgary.

Details:
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest

Tagger Cat Web Application Framework., Wed April 9th

2008-04-02T12:23:00.001-06:00

Grant Genereux has over 20 years experience in the software development field, and has been involved with Java for the last 10 years. He is also one of the original founders of the CJUG.

Grant has extensive experience in the enterprise Java software space, Java products, and consulting.

Recently Grant developed an open source web application framework based upon JSP and Hibernate. The focus of the framework is visual and rapid application development based upon extended metadata, declarative business logic and advanced JSP template techniques.

Grant will demo the highlights of the Tagger Cat framework, and will discuss the rationale and motivation behind developing yet another web framework in this already crowded field.

Time & Location

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest

JUnit 4, Wed March 12th

2008-03-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

JUnit4 has been around for a couple of years now, but some companies are still (inherently) wary of the upgrade. Peter will be examining JUnit4, particularly where it extends from and improves upon JUnit3. He will also show how it takes advantage of the latest features of the Java language.

presented by:

Peter Spierenburg is a Systems Analyst for Pason Systems, a local Oil and Gas Services company. He has three years experience with automated testing systems including JUnit.

details:

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest

3D CAVEman, Wed Feb 13th

2008-02-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

In May of 2007, the Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics, and Kasterstener Inc. (Red Deer, AB) introduced the CAVEman project.

We have created the world's first object-oriented Atlas of the human body. Currently, we have a model of the adult male anatomy, which consists of more than 3000 Java 3D(tm) objects.

Dr. Sensen will introduce the project and the developments around the characterization of complex genetic diseases and developmental patterns.

Dr. Sensen is the director of the Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics at the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine.

Details:

Wednesday, Feb 13th, 2008
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fifth Ave Place
West Tower
2nd floor conference room (Northwest corner)
237 - 4th Avenue Southwest