Boulder JUG

March 9th, 2010 Meeting

Come join us for the March meeting of the Boulder JUG. We will kick off the evening with a talk on Jython followed by a discussion on how to implement emergent designs.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's and TekSystems's Sponsorship's of the meeting room and of the food at the meetings.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00 PM: Jython - Python for the Java Platform

First we will go over the state of Jython. 2.5.1 release and the recently released Jython book. Then we will discuss our forthcoming 2.5.2 release and future work on 2.6. Then we will introduce Python and demo how Jython easily integrates with Java. Next we will explore how Django, a popular web app framework for Python, works on Jython. Using Pydev, a Python IDE that's an Eclipse plugin, we will use Django's ORM to build database models, then provide a quick yet highly usable UI through the Django admin. Then we will look at how to build a simple CRUD web app. Next we will look at deployment against a JEE app server. Jython deployment for Django supports WAR packaging, database connection pools, and thread pools. Lastly we will look at JMS integration. As time permits, we will look at other interesting Jython tools such as Sikuli (functional testing), Grinder/GrinderStone (load testing), and Field (computational art).

About Jim Baker

Jim has over 15 years of software development experience, focusing on business intelligence, enterprise application integration, and high-performance web applications. A three-time startup veteran, Jim is a member of the Python Software Foundation and a committer on Jython. He has presented at Devoxx, EuroPython, JavaOne, and the Python Conference, as well at numerous user groups and is a coauthor of The Definitive Guide to Jython from Apress. Jim is a graduate of both Harvard and Brown.

7:00-7:30: Pizza, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Pizza and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Implementing Emergent Designs

Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers some of the theory behind emergent design, but spends most of its time showing examples of how you can implement this important concept.

Agile architecture and design tries to defer important decisions to the last responsible moment. These techniques fall under the name of the emergent design, and that's what this presentation is about. It covers some of the theory behind emergent design, but mostly it describes and illustrates techniques to make emergency design possible. In this session, I cover testing as a design tool, re-factoring toward emergent design, and why emerging design is the only winning strategy in a world where requirements must change due to business decisions.

About Neal Ford

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.

February 9th 2010 Meeting

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's and TekSystems's Sponsorship's of the meeting room and of the food at the meetings.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00 PM: Design Fragments

Frameworks are a valuable way to share designs and implementations on a large scale. Client programmers, however, have difficulty using frameworks. They find it difficult to understand non-local client-framework interactions, design solutions when they do not own the architectural skeleton, gain confidence that they have engaged with the framework correctly, represent their successful engagement with the framework in a way that can be shared with others, ensure their design intent is expressed in their source code, and connect with external files.

A design fragment is a specification of how a client program can use framework resources to accomplish a goal. From the framework, it identifies the minimal set of classes, interfaces, and methods that should be employed. For the client program, it specifies the client-framework interactions that must be implemented. The structure of the client program is specified as roles, where the roles can be filled by an actual client s classes, fields, and methods. A design fragment exists separately from client programs, and can be bound to the client program via annotations in their source code. These annotations express design intent; specifically, that it is the intention of the client programs to interact with the framework as specified by the design fragment.

Here are more details on the topic.

About George Fairbanks

Dr. George Fairbanks has been teaching software architecture and object-oriented design for ten years for companies including Kinetium, Valtech, and Platinum Technology. In the Spring of 2008 he was the co-instructor for the graduate software architecture course at Carnegie Mellon University.

He holds a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by David Garlan and Bill Scherlis. His dissertation introduced design fragments, a new way to specify and assure the correct use of frameworks through static analysis. He has publications on frameworks and software architecture in selective academic conferences, including OOPSLA and ICSE.

He has written production code for telephone switches, plugins for the Eclipse IDE, and everything for his own web dot-com startup. He maintains a network of Linux servers in his spare time. George is a program committee member for 2009 Working International Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2009), and has been a referee for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).

7:00-7:30: Pizza, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Pizza and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Scaling Agile And Working With Distributed Teams

The early agile literature was adamant about two things: stick with small teams and put everyone in one room. However, in the years since the Agile Manifesto, the increasing popularity of agile and the dramatic improvements it brings has pushed it onto larger and larger projects. Additionally, having an entire team--especially on a large project--in one room, or even one building is a luxury no longer enjoyed by many projects.

In this presentation, we will look at how agile can be scaled to work on any multi-team project. Even a project with two teams will benefit from learning how to proactively manage interteam dependencies, conduct iteration planning for multiple teams, cultivate communities of practice, and coordinating work. Because so many projects are spread across multiple sites we will also look at overcoming the unique challenges facing distributed teams. We will look at deciding how to distribute a team, how to create coherence among team members, the importance of getting together and when are the most important times to use the travel budget, changes to what the team documents, and how to handle meetings when spread across timezones. Whether your project is spread across two locations in the same city or spread around the globe, you will leave with practical advice to try tomorrow.

About Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, where he teaches and coaches on Scrum and agile development. He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning, User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, and the newly published Succeeding with Agile: Software Development with Scrum. With more than 25 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. A frequent magazine contributor and conference speaker, Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. He can be reached through www.mountaingoatsoftware.com.

January 12th Meeting

Welcome to the first meeting of 2010! We are starting the year learning first about writing testable Java code and exploring NetKernel.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's and TekSystems's Sponsorship's of the meeting room and of the food at the meetings.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

We will also have a few Mike Cohn's books and a seat on one of his classes to raffle in preparation of his presentation in February.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00 PM: 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.

About Jim McMaster

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, where (among other things) he acts as world-wide publisher for Testing on the Toilet.

7:00-7:30: Pizza, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Pizza and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Introduction to NetKernel

NetKernel is a software platform that runs on the JVM. It is based on a very small pure REST kernel and includes tools and services in its stack (much like Unix). Like the Web, everything in NetKernel is identified by a URI.

NetKernel started as a research project in HP Labs in 1999. Since 2002, the technology has been advanced by 1060 Research. We are releasing NetKernel 4 on 10/9/2009 and this represents a major step forward in the refinement of the abstraction and platform.

NetKernel is used by large corporations (e.g. BlueShield of California) governments (e.g. US Army, Intelligence Agencies) and small companies. All report the same - applications built on NetKernel run faster, require less code, scale with cores and in general, simplify systems.

About Randolph Kahle

Randolph has worked at GTE Sylvania, HP, Microsoft, MageLang Institute, lead his own consulting company and is currently working with 1060 Research. He has worked with Java from the very beginnings of the language and was an early consultant, instructor and architectural advisor to investments banks, manufacturers and service companies.

He is currently working on NetKernel.

Tuesday, December 8th 2009 Meeting

We are going to have a different rythm for this month's meeting. We will have a retrospective on the past year and look into what will happen next year.

Sponsorship and Door Prizes

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponsorship of our meeting room and Tek-Systems's sponsorship of the food and sodas. Both JetBrains and ZeroTurnaround are sponsoring door prizes for this meeting.

2010 Speakers

We are looking for speakers for early 2010. Contact Frederic Jean with talk proposals.

LOCATION:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

6:00-7:00 PM: Retrospective and Looking Ahead to 2010

We will look at what happened in 2009 and discuss the topics that will be covered in 2010.

7:00PM: Taco Bar, Soda and Networking

We are grateful for Tek-System's sponsorship of the food and drinks throughout the year.

Post Meeting

We will head down to the Mountain Sun Brewery on Pearl Street after the meeting to continue chatting and networking.

Tuesday, November 10th Meeting

Join us for an overview of overview of content management systems with Grails followed by how to monitor your pulse using Java and SunSPOTs.

Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

The Rocky Mountain Software Symposium is coming back to Denver November 20 to the 22nd.

Sponsorship and Door Prizes

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponsorship of our meeting room and Tek-Systems's sponsorship of the pizza and sodas. Both JetBrains and ZeroTurnaround are sponsoring door prizes for this meeting.

2010 Speakers

We are looking for speakers for early 2010. Contact Frederic Jean with talk proposals.

6:00-7:00 PM: Content Management Systems With Grails

Content Management means many things to many people, and the only thing more abundant than the number of content management systems out there today are the number of unique use cases for managing content. In this presentation, we'll discuss benefits and pitfalls of both common use and custom approaches, including how building a custom CMS in a rapid-development framework like Grails may be a much better solution for your organization than trying to use an off-the-shelf package. Concentrating on examples from my own journey from off-the-shelf to a fully-custom system, I will review some of the common use cases I've seen for content management in the enterprise, and how using frameworks like Grails enables developers and architects to build custom CMSs more simply, cheaply, quickly, and to a higher standard than products currently marketed as ready-made solutions.

About Daniel Glauser

Daniel Glauser 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. His 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.

7:00-7:30 PM: Pizza, Soda and Networking

Tek-Systems is sponsoring the pizza and the soda.

7:30-9:00 PM: The Pulse Project

This is a look at the SunSPOT platform (which has both open source hardware and software) and using Java in embedded systems. In this presentation we're going to look at implementing a Java powered pulse rate monitor. Along the way we will see how using Java and OOP make the implementation of digital signal processing algorithms clear by breaking them into small manageable pieces. We'll also touch on real-time concerns and using RESTful web services to provide the user interface for our system.

About John Lowe

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.

Tuesday, October 13th Meeting

We will explore how to write Grails applications using Test First methods and how to debug and inspect Java applications using Open Source tools.

Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

The Rocky Mountain Software Symposium is coming back to Denver November 20 to the 22nd. We will raffle another pass at this meeting as well.

Sponsorship and Door Prizes

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponsorship of our meeting room and Tek-Systems's sponsorship of the pizza and sodas. Both JetBrains and ZeroTurnaround are sponsoring door prizes for this meeting.

LOCATION:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

6:00-7:00: Test Driven Development with Grails

Not many of us question that TDD is the right way to write software, but not many of us really practice it either. Even fewer of us do it when writing a web app, and with good reason: web app code is usually coupled to a framework, and the framework is usually coupled to a web server on one end and a database on the other. All this coupling does not set us up for testing success.

Grails 1.1 introduces several features that make it easy and truly productive to create a web application while testing first. In this talk, you'll learn how to use Domain and Controller mocking to write unit tests that can be run quickly and easily from the IDE or from the command line. TDD with 100% coverage had always been possible in Grails, but for the first time the tools make it the kind of thing you'll want to do. Learn to use the new features of the framework to build your web app the right way the first time.

About Tim Berglund

Tim Berglund runs a software consulting firm called the August Technology Group, which provides training, coaching, and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools, especially with the Grails framework. His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a frequent speaker at local user groups, and helps lead IASA Denver and the Denver Open Source User Group. He is currently writing the book, Deploying Grails (to be published by O'Reilly), due out in 2010. He lives in Littleton, CO with his wife and three children.

7:00-7:30: Pizza, Soda and Networking

Tek Systems is graciously sponsoring the pizza and sodas.

7:30-9:00: Java Open Source Debugging Tools

Expensive commercial utilities ruled the debugging market for years, but learn how a loose confederation of powerful Open Source debugging tools has adeptly fulfilled many of those same needs, and in many cases, taken debugging to the next level. In this bootcamp, get exposed to tcpdump, netstat, jps, jstatd, VisualVM, jhat and it’s OQL, Omniscient Debugger, TOD, Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool, jtracert, btrace and more. Hear real-world scenarios of when to pull each out of your toolbelt, see each tool in action on a unified Java Web Application exhibiting a plethora of issues and leverage each tool to discover and solve the problem.

About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 13 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, speaker on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group.

His experience includes successful JEE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, finance and telecommunications firms in addition to publishing several open source libraries. Matthew jumps at opportunities to mentor and educate teams on how to leverage open source. His current topics of R&D are Cloud Computing, Maven, iPhone, Distributed Version Control (Git), and Debugging Tools.

Matthew resides in Highlands Ranch with his beautiful wife and 1 year old daughter, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado offers.

Tuesday, September 8th Meeting

Our Scala streak continues this month with Dr. Venkat Subramaniam's presentations on Programming Scala and Concurrency on the JVM Using Scala.

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponsorship of our meeting room and Tek-Systems's sponsorship of the food and sodas. Both JetBrains and ZeroTurnaround are sponsoring door prizes for this meeting.

Update: The Rocky Mountain Software Symposium returns to Denver on November 20-22nd. We will raffle a complimentary pass at the September and October meetings.

LOCATION:
Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

6:00-7:00 PM: Programming Scala

Scala is a nice language to program on the JVM. It's concise, scalable, powerful, expressive, and integrates well with Java. Your day-to-day tasks like processing XML, matching patterns of various expressions, working with collections and String, are all made simpler, concise, and elegant by the Scala language syntax and build-in libraries. In this presentation you will immerse into the Scala goodness, and learn how you can make use of it in your Java applications.

7:00-7:30 PM: Pizza and Sodas

Tek-Systems is graciously sponsoring the pizza and sodas.

7:30-9:00 PM: Concurrency on the JVM Using Scala

Multithreading on multi-core processors and multi-processors bring a new challenge. Unlike multi tasked systems, your applications when deployed on these processors get a greater availability of computing power and resources. However, the level of abstraction for creating multithreaded applications is too low in Java. You are confronted with possibilities of data contention and thread deadlocks. One of the key strengths of Scala is its actor based concurrency model with immutable state. In this presentation we will exclusively focus on the concurrency API and facilities of Scala. We will develop a very practical and realistic application that illustrates the elegance, simplicity, and strength of Scala Concurrency.

About Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc. has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He helps his clients succeed with Agile Development and various software technologies. He is a veteran speaker at the NFJS conference series and a frequent invited speaker at various other international software conferences. He authored ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), and co-authored the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book "Practices of an Agile Developer," and authored "Programming Groovy" and "Programming Scala" (all from Pragmatic Bookshelf).

We will not record this month's presentations.

Introduction to Scala

Click to Play

Whenever a language begins to gain popularity there is a need to present introductory material. But after a awhile the need shifts to understanding the strengths of a language. So in this presentation I am going to present a snapshot of Scala's unique features and paradigms. At start of the talk you will get to know Scala syntax, closures and functional programming. Next we will review unique features that Scala provides for DSLs such as ADTs, parsing and pattern matching. From this point we will study the improvements Scala makes to OO with strong typing, traits and mixins and how these improvements provide intrinsic support for new paradigms. Finally we will review actors and how Scala's capabilities are finding there way into the real world.

A Gentle Introduction to Lift

Click to Play

Tuesday, August 11th 2009 Boulder Java Users Group

This meeting is all about Scala. We will start with an introduction to the language itself followed by a look at the Lift web framework.

Many thanks to Big Sky Technology for sponsoring the meeting room and to Tek-Systems for sponsoring the Pizza.

Location

We will meet in room #301 instead of the usual room. We will go back to our regular room in September.

Wolf Law Building, Room #301

2450 Kittredge Loop Road

Boulder, CO 80309

6:00-7:00 PM Introduction to Scala

Whenever a language begins to gain popularity there is a need to present introductory material. But after a awhile the need shifts to understanding the strengths of a language.

So in this presentation I am going to present a snapshot of Scala's unique features and paradigms. At start of the talk you will get to know Scala syntax, closures and functional programming. Next we will review unique features that Scala provides for DSLs such as ADTs, parsing and pattern matching. From this point we will study the improvements Scala makes to OO with strong typing, traits and mixins and how these improvements provide intrinsic support for new paradigms. Finally we will review actors and how Scala's capabilities are finding there way into the real world.

About Tom Flaherty

Tom Flaherty is Chief Architect at Axiom Architectures. He is currently authoring papers about Enterprise Architecture and applying this work to state governments. In 2008 he developed a symbolic math application in Scala for Glaxo. In the past he established enterprise and OO methodologies along with 4-Tier platforms for Williams Communications, DMR and NorTel. He lives in Centennial with his wife Fifi and Maine Coon cat Buddy.

7:00-7:30 PM Pizza and Sodas compliments of Tek-Systems

7:30-9:00PM Lift Web Framework

The talk will start with some background on Lift and then dive right into a Comet and AJAX example that shows how simple it is to make dynamic web applications with Lift. Next we'll talk about some of Lift's unique features that simplify development. Finally, we'll go into detail on Lift's templating system and how that lends itself to clean separation of logic and presentation layers.

About Derek Chen-Becker

Derek is a committer on the Lift project and a co-author of The Definitive Guide to Lift with Tyler Weir and Marius Danciu. Derek has been working on the Lift project and Scala since 2007, and has been writing software in Java for over 12 years. Derek is currently the Senior Network Engineer and Security Architect for CPI Corporation, which owns and operates the Sears Portrait Studios and PictureMe! Portrait Studios.

Room Change: Meeting in Room #207

We are moving the meeting back to our usual room (#207) in the Wolf law Library at CU Boulder.