Felipe Gaucho's Blog

June 2007 Archives

Global JUG community leaders together

JUG Communities represent the core of the Java universe - the first layer of organization between Java professionals, like local sport teams or that bar you used to go with your school friends. It is something glued to the roots of your society - something stable that is always there, no matter the velocity of the transformations around you. They speak your language and they share your values, that good-bad-ugly feelings that only local boyz can understand - they are your people and you love it. The original format of JUGs was quite informal and promoted by Sun as a simple and natural way to reinforce the adoption of Java technologies around the world. Globalization seems to be strong motivation behind American companies, and Sun as many others promoted this label "Java User Group" in order to recognize local Java heroes. The renascence of JUG Community After an initial period, when everyone with a computer could create a JUG, the profile of the groups started to become clear. Today is less complicated to know where are the JUGs and who are the people behind them - but we are still sufering the natural issues of global scale initiatives. Not all JUGs are visible, not all are well supported. To understand and support the behavior of JUGs all over the world, Sun created two special leaders communities: Java Champions and Global JUG Community Leaders. These special members of the Java community has the privilege and the responsibility to help others to promote Java. It is not a simple task, because you must handle very different cultures and localized issues. That's why it is important to promote meetings between these special leaders and also to push visibility to the local communities represented in such meetings. During Jazoon, we will have a JUG Leaders BOF with the presence of a lot of JUG leaders, Java Champions and, for the very first time, the presence of all JUG Community Leaders together: Michael Hüttermann, Leonardo Galvao and Fabrizio Gianneschi. A great chance for confluence and an open forun about ideas that can help JUGs to get even better in a near future. All JUG members are invited to participate, to know what is being done in other countries and what could be changed in order to facilitate the Java adoption all over the world. Suggested Topics for the historical session The importance of JUGs, and how to create your own and keep it alive Java.net and the JUGs Community: what’s available and what else should be there Making the most of the growing corporate support for JUGs Closing chasms: Java User Groups and social initiatives Discussing the future of Java from the trenches

Michael Hüttermann Leonardo Galvao Fabrizio Gianneschi

NetBeans World Tour takes Europe this weekend

For countries around Switzerland, NetBeans Day is a rare opportunity to check the Netbeans Team showing all features of the IDE and also introducing the novelties being develop to the Netbeans 6.0. Next Saturday, 23 of June 2007.

I attended the Netbeans Day at San Francisco, and the conference day was fantastic. All those old myths about productivity and interoperability are dismissed on the stage and they introduces JRuby, NB6 power tools and several other practical and real world examples.

Technologies are becoming more sophisticated and the discussion about development tools and its productivity and usability are a hype topic everywhere. Despite all levels of purism there is this common feeling that is almost impossible to keep competitive without good supporting tools. This NetBeans day is a chance to you give the IDE a new chance, a second review. After a long time eclipsed by the concurrents, NetBeans is receiving a strong investment from Sun as part of its strategies of moving from software to business consulting market. All this investment will be released in November 2007, and if you want to have few months of advantage in preparing your team for the next generations of Java IDEs, it is time to check it out :)

Green grass project looking for innovative technologies

The core of the Footprint Project is alive, and during the next few days I will be organizing a minimum documentation in order to publish the first stable release. The current snapshot is able to generate and sign PDF documents through a concise code - a very good beginning considering the scarce resources of the project. Now it is time to check the outlook and to start discussing the more advanced and valuable features of the project, as follows:

1. To generate a web-service for validating the generated certificates.
2. To generate a client to the web-service
   • a web-application
   • a desktop or rich-client application

I am here playing this fortune teller role in order to guess the chances of the new technologies to survive along the time. My crystal ball is displaying a mix of old labels and novelties like jMaki, JavaFX, Netbeans, Glassfish or EJB3 for example. Some of these technologies are already materialized in the software market, other ones are just whispering good features, prospective ideas waiting a chance to be adopted. We all play these mind games some times, and we know every Open Source project based on pure collaboration - no financial support and very small teams - need some kind of special attraction to be noticed by the Java community. So, our task now is to check the horizon and bet on the winners.

The early adoption of new technologies is a strategy to give the project a chance to survive along the time and also a better chance to be adopted in real world scenarios. My past experiences taught me this strategy works, but it is also very risky and several good ideas suffer premature death due to the excess of effort required by the learning curve and the absence of mind share around the new concepts.

In the other hand, it is not worth basing a project with medium marketing appeal in old and stable technologies because it ends like a scholar work: beauty, nice tailored but extremely boring. That kind of project everyone knows how to do but nobody has time to do, so your project is just something easy to be done and it will probably be overlapped by other project with the same nature - eventually with more resources or just a better pedigree.

The innovation dilemma

Now we have to think about the classical dilemma in software design:

	How to design a software that will be innovative, useful by
	its robustness and easy to maintain with scarce resources?

I will leave the answer for you, I have my own concepts about that but I prefer to wait your thoughts to not influence your suggestions.

Introducing the Footprint Project

Few months ago, my JUG participated in the Sun Tech Days Brazil - with more the three thousand participants over 20 different cities. The event was fantastic and the international evangelists sponsored by Sun made a great work introducing new technologies and the prospective innovations about Java. Despite the great success, the management model of JUGs - uniquely based on community collaboration - caused some issues on the organization of the events in all participant cities.

This kind of situation motivates international JUG leaders to discuss on how to prevent or mitigate these problems in order to aggregate more quality to the local events. * If you are JUG leader, you can (and must) participate of our discussions here.

The need of events certificates

The most part of Java professionals invests in their carriers without much concern about proving when they buy books, attend conferences or courses - they are just serious professionals looking for technical education and they usually don't care if the conferences provide digital or printed certificates of participation. In many countries it is common such investment to be supported by the companies as part of their competitiveness strategies. Unfortunately, not all societies are so stable and fair with people and some markets are so competitive that forces people to register their investment in education as a better chance during job interviews. People living in these under development countries - like Brazil - looks forward some official way to prove they are skilled, including all types of certificates: Java Certifications, graduation and post-graduation diplomas and even minor certificates like participation in local events.

Other common situation in such emergent societies is about the working time. Most part of the JUG events are scheduled during weekends or evenings to provide the local professionals a better chance to attend. Despite that, some bigger events like Sun Tech Days are only possible during the commercial time. Every time we invade the companies working time we feel some kind of disturbance in the JUG community, when some members are just not allowed to participate because their companies don't believe in changing the contracted working time for self-education working time. The discussion about the relationship between professionals and companies are far beyond the goal of this blog entry, and in many cases JUGs can do not much about that. I guess however that one of important goals of a JUG is to promote this kind of discussion to help the community to evolve through examples and identification of what is good and what is not so good in the local Java community.

Other important learned lesson for me - after 5 years as JUG leader in a community without good salaries and without good working conditions for the average case - is that the discussion about better ways to work must be done in parallel of actions to promote a better life for people today. We cannot just discuss philosophically or wait a better society in ten years, we must dream of that but we also must try to mitigate any problem that bothers the quotidian of the JUG members. In that sense, I created the footprint project.

The footprint project

Inspired by the need of JUG Events certificates, we wrote a set of User Stories in the project home-page, but the main goals for the moment are summarized below:

• Generate certificates for JUG events: basically signed PDF documents that say this person attended this event. It is already working in the current snapshot release of footprint.
• Provide a web-service to validate the generated certificates:it means, once a JUG member present his CV to a human resource department, they can validate if the attached certificates are valid and recognized by the JUG. This feature is just planned to be done, but we are still discussing the best technologies and also the best way to use digital certificates to sign the documents.
• Fidelity Program for Java events: it is an old dream,to have a way to do cross-conferences promotions, giving your JUG or commercial conference a chance to check if you attended the last JavaOne or Jazoon, per example. If your JUG can know who attended the last three events, you can provide them some vip attention. It is easy to be done in your local community, but if I go to one of your JUG events and say I was present in the last three events of a JUG elsewhere..., how can you check that? Easy use case for one or two people - in a simple perspective,you just trust in my words and it is done :). But if you promote a conference with a thousand people, and you want to give some special privileges to the old customers or the ones that usually goes to international conferences - how to check that? I particularly love this feature because it detaches the project from localized problems and provide business possibilities for all Java community.

The project is new,we have a snapshot release available and we are discussing the user stories and designing the project modules. We are looking for help, and even small contributions are very important now, like logo design, early adoption and design tips and suggestions. Your experience and your thoughts about the User Stories are also very important, and any suggestion that help us to do a better product will implies that your name will be included in the hall of fame of the footprint project.

So, visit our project, contribute and tell to your JUG leader about that - we certify you :)

Sun Spot @ Jazoon'07

Simon Ritter will present a Sun Spot demonstration during Jazoon'07, including the wonderful Minority Report demo and technical detail on how companies can produce embedded Java application to create innovative solutions. I attended the demonstration of Sun Spot and was quite impressive; so, if your company is looking for the next hype in electronic devices, you should come to check it out :)
Some applications of Sun Spot Sun Spot is a new electronic device, fully programmable with Java and a lot of business and research open possibilities. below is a list of projects, which already use it: Sun SPOT Road Tour Monitoring Playstation 3 and plants through the web with Sun Spot. Fascinating students projects. Autonomous Light Air Vessels.

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