Daniel Wildt's Blog: Community: Global Education and Learning Community Archives

Posted by dwildt on May 29, 2008 at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Java Certification can be a good way for one to set a goal to increase knowledge in Java.

Is the certification important? Maybe the certification will help your career and it will not be a bad thing in your resume.

And as I was saying, it would be a good way to set a goal to increase knowledge.

If you start with a Java Associate certification and them move to a Java Programmer or Web Component Developer, or even to a Architect certification, well, there are lots of paths to follow.

To help people in references, FUJA, a Java Study Group from Rio Grande do Sul, in the south of Brazil is starting some initiatives to study and prepare to Java Certifications. Check this page from FUJA Wiki with lots of references to study for Java Certifications.

Learning Java with Passion! Amazing!

Posted by dwildt on May 23, 2008 at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Checking Arun Gupta's blog, I found this link to a free Ruby on Rails online course. It will start on July 15th. Great initiative! Amazing!

But the post is not about this, it is about all the resources available at Java Passion.

You can find in there great information about Java, Enterprise Java and currently the WebServices course is running. Learn concepts like WSDL and SOAP, important if you are learning the concepts behind WebServices.

If you are looking for new technology, you may want to check the material related to EJB 3 and JPA.

Open Source Documentation - Collaborate!

Posted by dwildt on May 12, 2008 at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm teaching in college since 2004, and most of the resources I use in my classes are online resources. Very dynamic and easy to follow, everybody can access and use that to learn more about some subject.

Today with internet and this blog explosion we have it is very good to see people spreading knowledge across the globe.

You have portals dedicated to some specific technology, we have people running their blogs and sharing what they know. That's great!

At the perspective of the Global Education and Learning Community, the GELC, and also looking at java.net portal, well, we have that! Lots of blogs and articles available for the community and we can't forget all the projects we have inside our communities!

The first resource I would like to suggest, if you are looking for a place to share knowledge, is Curriki.org! Curriki.org is connected to the GELC community. Inside java.net we can create projects, and if that's the case we can create projects with goals to share knowledge. Having that, you can use curriki.org to create your online courses, create your classes and have a place where the whole community can get information. That's a good place for teachers.

I have shared some materials inside curriki.org a few months ago and will share more soon. It is a great opportunity to give more information and help people to prepare themselves to bigger challenges.

If you are looking for a more generic resource, that would be Wikipedia! You can even start to learn Java in there.

Back to java.net portal you can check the Javapedia, which is a project that want to cover all aspects of the Java platform! You can learn a little more about Javapedia at Wikipedia!

And that's it. Some good resources where you can share knowledge using a GNU Free Documentation License or Creative Commons.

enJine project graduated! Learn game programming with Java now!

Posted by dwildt on December 12, 2007 at 07:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hello! I have interviewed Ricardo Nakamura, from enJine project. In this post you will find more information about this great project and how you can use it to learn game programming using Java!

Q1: It is a great honor to interview enJine project team. Who is the enJine project team?

Ricardo: The enJine project (http://enjine.org) is developed by a group of researchers and interns at Interlab - Interactive Technologies Laboratory. Currently, the core project team is composed by Romero Tori, João Luiz Bernardes Jr., and me. We have been in the project since its inception and now concentrate on maintaining the enJine core modules. There are also two interns, André Uyeda and Gabriel Ramires, who are taking part in the development of enJine. Many more people have worked in the project, and we have a list of them in the project site.

While the Interlab team focuses on enJine architecture and core functionality, we have started cooperating with other institutions for the development of additional modules. Our first partnership is with professor Esteban Clua at UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense).

Q2: What enJine stands for?

Ricardo: EnJine is a didactic game engine developed in Java. It is important to stress that the goal of enJine has always been to serve as a didactic tool. When necessary we do sacrifice some performance for the sake of clarity, correctness and simplicity. That said, games created with enJine tend to perform well. But it was never meant to compete with commercial game engines.

Q3: Tell us about the beginning of the project. What were the difficulties and the challenges you were facing?

Ricardo: We started the development of enJine in 2003, about the same time our game development technology group was created. We had done some studies with the scripting layer of commercial game engines such as the Unreal Engine, and we had researched the few papers available on engine architecture. David Eberly's "3D Game Engine Design" was also a very helpful book. Our motivation to create enJine was that we needed a tool that could be used with more freedom than the scripting interfaces allowed. We wanted to be able to show the core architecture of a game engine and let students play with it, if they wanted to -- and that architecture would need to be clear and simple enough for a novice student to understand. We also expected that enJine could be used as a tool to create didactic games. It is interesting that, after many years, we are coming back to that goal in enJine 4.0, which may bring with it high-level tools to aid in game creation.

As for difficulties and challenges, the lack of in-depth information about game engines at the beginning of our project led us to some mistakes in the first version of enJine. We had to spend many months reviewing the entire architecture to correct these problems. After the first year of the project, some of the members of the initial team had to focus on their own research, to finish their masters' and doctoral theses. These facts together caused a year-long stall in the project, at least in terms of new releases.

Q4: Tell us about the presentations at SBGames 2007. How was the event?

Ricardo: This year, we had three presentations at SBGames: two papers that were related to enJine and a tutorial about using enJine for education. SBGames is a great event to meet the people involved in game development and research in Brazil. It is good to see that it keeps growing: this year we had a whole new track about Games and Culture, with papers, posters and tutorials.

Q5: What are the future plans for the project?

Ricardo: Right now, we are looking for collaborators interested in extending enJine functionality or using it for any kind of project. We have used enJine for education and as a research testbed, and we believe that other people might benefit from it.

In terms of development schedule, we are in the planning phase of enJine 4.0, which will incorporate new features of Java 5.0 into the core. We have already done some prototyping of the new version, which will include new things such as hierarchies of game objects. We also have plans to start implementing high-level tools for game creation and adding new classes to enJine's framework layer -- things that should make enJine even easier to use.

Q6: How the project can be used in classes inside educational institutions? Is it being used already? Can you give us some examples?

Ricardo: We believe that enJine can be used as a tool in the context of different subjects of computer science, computer engineering and game design courses. We have used it to teach Computer Graphics to computer science and computer engineering undergraduates. In this case, students used enJine to create a game as a term project, and the results were very positive. We have published a paper about this experience in Siggraph 2006 Educators' Program, which can be found at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1179295.1179308

Q7: Have you guys checked the curriki.org portal? Is there a possibility for you guys to share gaming knowledge and maybe setup a class plan to use enJine for teaching in the future? Maybe other educational institutions can use the same plan to teach.

Ricardo: At this time, we are producing a computer graphics course for distance learning based on enJine. It its meant for another project, but we could probably share some of its contents, or at least the class plan. It would be very interesting for us to participate in curriki.org. Right now, it would be a matter of allocating someone from our laboratory to learn more about the portal. This way, we can plan an effective way to collaborate -- maybe even with support materials designed specifically for curriki.org.

Q8: What are the main Java technologies used inside enJine. Which one you like most? Which one is more challenging to work with?

Ricardo: We rely heavily on Java 3D to perform the rendering in enJine. That is probably the most prominent Java technology used in this project. I have worked with Java 3D since 2000, lurking in the mailing lists and following its evolution. It is interesting to see the game industry nowadays turning to multi-threaded, decoupled rendering loops, which is something Java 3D implemented from the start but was seen as "overkill" for game applications for a long time.

Q9: If someone from the community wants to help enJine project, how can the person proceed?

Ricardo: They can contact us through the java.net site or enjine.org. While we keep all development information about enJine in java.net, the enjine.org serves as a more general portal for all possible users of enJine: developers, enJine users, educators and so on.

Q10: Thanks so much for your time. Do you guys want to add something?

Ricardo: Just five years ago, academic research about game development was not taken very seriously, and there were few curricula about game design and development. It is great to see how much these things have changed in such a small time span. We hope that enJine may be helpful to the new generation of game researchers and developers in their first steps. In future versions, it may even be helpful for the development of educational games and serious games.

Have you already used Curriki portal?

Posted by dwildt on November 15, 2007 at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As one of the GELC leaders I can say that one of the things I like most is to teach. Doing that I have the opportunity to share what I know and always learn something I don't from my students.

Every day I try to make my students open to share what they know with others. We talk so much about open source software, but we have also open source documentation available! We can use Creative Commons license, we can use GNU Free Documentation License, we have lots of options to work with.

Wikipedia is doing a lot for us, showing that we can have knowledge sharing from everywhere in the world, working as a global community.

Now, we have one new portal to share our knowledge! Try curriki.org, and check the Global Education and Learning Community! This website is linked directly into GELC community inside java.net. We have Java projects inside java.net and knowledge sharing inside curriki.org.

I started to use curriki.org a couple of months ago. Check some of the material I have submitted inside the portal using this link.

The first material I have submitted is related to a Java leveling course my students gave at FACENSA faculty, from Gravataí city, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil. The base language of the material is Portuguese.

Project to help events and trainings - footprint

Posted by dwildt on November 11, 2007 at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Java.net is full of interesting projects. As a helper for the study groups community, one of those interesting projects is footprint, owned by Felipe Gaucho. Learn more about this Java community professional and about his project.

Study groups have events and internal trainings. We need to generate certificates and provide them to our students so they can update their resume.

Find out more about footprint project and Felipe in this interview.

1) Why do you have decided to build footprint project? Can you tell us some of the problems you were facing?

It was more a community demand than my personal decision, but of course I love to do that.

My JUG has 5 years now, and during this period we evolved from a small group of Java passionists to a broader community, including students, professionals and companies' representatives. In the last two years, our events have attracted an impressive number of attenddees, what gave us status and power to seek partnerships but also unveiled some management issues.

The kickoff of the project was the Sun Tech Days 2007, with hundreds of people and with international speakers introducing the best of Java technology all day long. Such big event imposes itself to be done in the business hours, and several of our JUG members were unable to be there due to their rigid contracts about working hours. Many people asked us an official document to prove their participation in the event, as an easier way to convince their bosses. Some workers confessed their contracts already predict some education time during the working hours but such processes also require a formal documentation in order to be approved.

The number of people in such strange situtation was much more than we expected, and we immediately started promoting a campaign with companies owners in order to promote a better relationship between companies and their employees. We soon figured out that interference in the relationship between workers and companies is far beyond the scope of our JUG :)

Despite any personal opinion about that, I decided to listen the community, and then Footprint raised up. After the requirements brain storm in the discussion mailing list, I started evaluating the involved technology and the possibilities of the small tool - I started feeling it as a prospective winner idea.

2) I know you like a lot XML technologies. Where do you use XML technologies inside Footprint?

Footprint is a support tool, and it was designed to be adopted by as many users as possible. Flexibility is the key of footprint, and today or can use it as a console application, a library or, in terms of Design Pattern, a component.

The best way I found to provide such flexibility without risking the robustness of the system was to bind the configuration of the Footprint to a model: an XML Schema. We adopted the usage of XML configuration files instead of the classic Properties approach, as I commented in my blog.

The configuration schema is binded to Java classes through JAXB 2.0, and we are experimenting a higher productivity and a safer coding with such decision. I recommend everyone to checkout the code from SVN and try it a bit, it is a very comfortable way of coding.

3) How is footprint roadmap going? What are the plans for 2008?

The roadmap is evolving faster than I expected in the begginning, when I received some sckepticism against the project. Several comments in the blogsphere suggested that such small feature should not deserve the status of a full project, and some times I get myself questioning about that. But soon I published the first release, the feedback was a good surprise and I detected a good demand for it. Since then, I've received some support from collaborators and several testimonials of users happy with the Footprint early results.

For now, Footprint provides you an easy way to publish signed PDF files and also comes with an utility mailer for dispatching the generated documents to its addressees. For the next few weeks, we plan to release the support to Timestamps, and then the first phase will be complete. The final FOR will be released.

Next steps: since I started publishing the certificates, I am looking for a good way to manage them. Today I have several folders in my local machine, containing thousands of certificates. Every time I make a mistake in a certificate, the JUG member should ask me to fix it, by email, without any automatic support or logging over this manual operation. After few months as user of Footprint, I am convinced its great value to the community will be completed with a document management system.

For 2008 our goal is to design and to release the Footprint Server. The outline of such system is still open, but I am thinking about a web-service based system, or even better, a JBI - Java Business Integration - system behind the scene. This part will be a wonderful chance for learning new technologies, a moment for innovation.

4) What kind of Java skills a developer must have to help Footprint project?

Java SE is the minimum requirement, and I am also proposing for the students of my JUG a chance to them learning English through the project documentation. Design Patterns, XML and Web-Services would be a must.

5) What is the main point of contact for Footprint users? And for Footprint developers?

For now, the project communication presents a low traffic, so we are receiving the feedback through our personal mail addresses. Anyone interested in the project can contact me directly through the email
fgaucho (at) gmail dot com.

6) What is the name of the next Footprint release?

Who knows? eheh, The project releases receive acronyms of name of airports. The first release name "FOR" refers to FORtaleza Airport,
from the capital city of the State of Ceara, in honor of CEJUG - where everything began. The next one should be proposed by anyone who participates in the project, we didn't decide yet.

7) What are the main technologies that you work with?

In my daylight job, I am working with web-sevices, security and Java X .Net interoperability. I am working for Netcetera AG, and our main products are bank and credit card applications. After a day thinking about critical systems, nothing better than use Footprint to retrieve my creative thinking and get back the joy of programming :)

8) I love Java...

Because it is a lot of fun :)

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