DenverJUG

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.

Our March Meeting will be on 3/10/2010 at the TIV 320 AB – Baerresen Ballroom.
Neal Ford will be the featured speaker on “Evolutionary Architecture”
and Jim McMaster will give the first talk/lecture on “Writing Testable Code”

The address for the Tivoli Building is: 900 Auraria Parkway Denver, CO 80204-1852

Schedule

5:30-6:00 PM Refreshments and Networking
6:00-7:00 PM Writing Testable Code
7:00-7:05 PM Short break
7:05-7:15 PM Announcements
7:15-8:45 PM Evolutionary Architecture
     8:45 PM Door prize raffle

First Session/Basic Concepts

Writing Testable Code

Writing tests is easy, right?  Anyone can use JUnit.  The hard part is writing your code so it is easy (or even possible) to test.  Tonight, we’ll talk about some techniques for making your code easier to test, and some pitfalls to avoid.  If you wish to get the slides from the presentation, please contact Jim ( jmcmaster<at>google<dot>com ) and he can give you a copy.  Corporate requirements Jim works under do not allow it to be posted here on the site.

About The Speaker

Jim McMaster has been writing code since it was punched on cards.  In recent years, he has become a fan of developer testing.  He is a Software Engineer at Google, Inc. in Boulder.  He mainly works on Google Docs, and acts as world-wide publisher for Testing on the Toilet.

Main/Featured talk

Evolutionary Architecture

This talk describes an agile approach to architecture, and merges the current state-of-the-art thinking in both service oriented architectures(SOA) and web-based architectures like HTTP and REST.
In software, architecture and design are separate concepts. Emergent design allows you to change the overall design of your code, but you must have a baseline architecture in place. That doesn’t mean that you can’t allow your architecture to evolve over time, and that’s what this session covers. In this session I described how to use web technologies (HTTP, REST, etc) to implement robust, scalable enterprise architecture.This talk is based on original research and development done by ThoughtWorks, and represents the current state of the art in building truly scalable enterprise architectures. This topic combines the subjects of service oriented architecture with web technologies to create a hybrid providing you with the benefits of both approaches.

About The Speaker

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.

Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.

He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

We are having a shared end-of-year meeting December 9th from 6 – 9 PM at The Sports Book located at 1434 Blake St. in Denver.

Our sponsors are providing fun activities and we’ll have some door prizes.

Please RSVP by the end of the day on 12/2/2009 on the link below so we can plan accordingly: http://dugparty.eventbrite.com/

Thanks again to our sponsors – K*FORCE, TekSystems, Vaco, and Real Eyes and thanks to Jordan McCullough for taking some really great pictures, which I’ve enclosed as a gallery below.