Omaha Java Users Group

Right on the heels of an amazing NoFluffJustStuff conference, we have another fubtastic OJUG meeting quickly approaching!

This meeting will feature lightning talks from a couple great speakers!

Scott Hickey, fresh off of his NFJS talk, will be presenting two talks: one on Jasper Reports, and another on building a “common utilities” plugin for Eclipse.
John Christopher will enlighten us on how we can use JUnit to work with a JavaScript behavior/specification testing framework.

Please RSVP to Matt Secoske (secoskem @ gmail.com)

Call for presentations:

If you are interested in talking at this meeting (or another), please feel free to contact Matt about that as well!

Hello everyone,

It is time once again for a fantastic Omaha Java Users Group meeting!

This month our speaker is Corey Spitzer, who will impart his knowledge of the iBatis ORM framework upon us!

Also, we have a special prize to give away:  One full pass to the upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff conference here in Omaha!  This is a great prize, worth $975!!

===> PLEASE RSVP to Matt Secoske (reply to this email or send an email to secoskem@gmail.com )

Date:
Tuesday, March 18th
- Food / Open forum starting at 5:30PM
- Presentation to start at 6:30PM

Location:
Gallup Riverfront Campus
1001 Gallup Dr, Omaha, NE
(402) 951-2003 [ map]

Hope to see everyone there!

As previously announced, we are having a special guest speaker tonight: Brian Sletten from NoFluffJustStuff!

Also, we will be giving away a Free Pass to the upcoming NoFluffJustStuff conference here in Omaha!

Date:
 Tuesday, February 19th
 - Food / Open forum starting at 5:30PM
 - Presentation to start at 6:30PM

Location:
Gallup Riverfront Campus
1001 Gallup Dr, Omaha, NE
(402) 951-2003 [ map]

Hope to see everyone there!

This February 19th we will have a special speaker: Brian Sletten, NFJS speaker extraordinaire, will talk to us about
REST.  Brian’s talk is sponsored by NoFluffJustStuff and their upcoming conference in Omaha, the Greater Nebraska Software Symposium.  The conference is April 4th-6th…. be sure to talk to your manager about this great (and inexpensive!) opportunity to learn!

Link: http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/omaha/2008/04/index.html

Location will be Gallup as usual, times to be announced.

Here is a little more info on Brian:
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is a partner in Zepheira, LLC, a new services company focused on using semantic-oriented technologies to solve architectural and data integration problems not handled by conventional tools and techniques.

Hope to you see you there!

Welcome one and all!   Including those visiting our website after hearing about us at this weekend’s NoFluffJustStuff.com symposium.

OJUG wants you!

• OJUG wants you to please come to our next meeting on 17 April 2007 (meetings frequently include free food).
• OJUG wants you to  join our google groups:

• General Discussion
• Announcements
• Jobs

OJUG is always looking for anyone to get involved with full hour talks, 5-15 minute lightning talks, SIG participation, almost anything…. Please contact us.

The Greater Nebraska Software Symposium returns to Omaha on March23-25th.  GNSS 2007 will offer four concurrent sessions for you tochoose from.  The hot topics covered at GNSS 2007 include:
* Groovy/Grails
* OSGI
* Domain Driven Design
* Annotations
* Java 6.0
* REST
* JRuby
* Drools
* Ajax
* JPA and many more!
We will be giving away a pass at the February 20th OJUG meeting, so be there for your chance to win!

Also, there is an early bird special going on through March 5th, and seating is limited, so get your ticket soon!

In case you are interested, there is a new API, that supports a standard interface to any compliant scripting engine, within the javax.script package in Java 6. John Hunt over at Reg Developer has a great educational article on this API and how you can use it:

In an ideal world, rather than invent our own scripting engine we could have used an existing engine, one that supported a well-known or standardised language. Such engines are now available and indeed implementations for Java can be obtained both commercially and as open source projects. However, such engines each tend to have their own interface and standards.

Java Standard Edition 6.0 introduces a new API that supports a standard interface to any compliant scripting engine. This feature allows different scripting engines to be plugged in, but all are accessed in the same way, through a standard API.

Read complete, ready-to-print article here.

Should OJUG meet at 1Staff or Gallup going forward?

Maybe yes, maybe not, but make sure you read this white paper written by Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling and Peter von der Ahé. Here is a snippet:

Modern programming languages provide a mixture of primitives for composing programs. C#, Javascript, Ruby, Scala, and Smalltalk (to name just a few) have direct language support for function types and inline function-valued expression, called closures. A proposal for closures is working its way through the C++ standards committees as well. Function types provide a natural way to express some kinds of abstraction that are currently quite awkward to express in Java. For programming in the small, closures allow one to abstract an algorithm over a piece of code; that is, they allow one to more easily extract the common parts of two almost-identical pieces of code. For programming in the large, closures support APIs that express an algorithm abstracted over some computational aspect of the algorithm. We propose to add function types and closures to Java. We anticipate that the additional expressiveness of the language will simplify the use of existing APIs and enable new kinds of APIs that are currently too awkward to express using the best current idiom: interfaces and anonymous classes.

After you are done reading the whitepaper, follow an interesting debate at Nutrun.com .

“Sun” gods must be crazy! Common VB.Net features on the Java platform! According to Graham Hamilton, a Sun vice president :

“The Java language is a great language,” he said. “There are other language styles out there. Some people like using scripting languages, some people like using dynamic languages and some people like Visual Basic.”

What the company is not trying to do is clone any specific version of Visual Basic, Hamilton said. Sun is attempting to support common VB.Net features on the Java platform.

“If you’re familiar with VB.Net, this will be a very easy-to-learn language for you,” Hamilton said of the Basic implementation Sun is working on.

So be ready to see dynamic languages integration in “Mustang” version of Java SE. Read more about this development here .