This year's JAOO conference is covering developing large software systems, agile development, J2EE best practices, design patterns, testing large systems and experiences from building large distributed systems. While this is primarily a Java conference, we're going to see a bunch of .NET coverage this year. It's also the only conference I know of that sponsors an IT-Run...literally a Danish mile.</p>

There is quite the line-up of speakers at this conference so it should definitely be a good time to see some old friends and make some new ones. A couple include: Craig Russell, John Crupi, Martin Fowler, Patrick Linsky, and Floyd Marinescu.

I'm speaking in the Pervasive Computing track doing a session called 'Integrating Mobile Field Data in the Enterprise'.  since I've been doing some cool stuff in that area lately. So if you're going to be attending JAOO, stop by and say hello and if you're not going to be there, maybe I'll post a blog about it when I return.

I caught the second keynote today that Bill Janeway of Warburg Pincus gave talking about alternative models of the venture investing process. Yes, this was a financial talk at a tech conference, but Tim O’Reilly was right. This isn’t just your everyday financial talk. It was quite interesting to see our industry presented this way. I won’t spend to much time recapping this, but it seems like the days of round financing are turning into the days of fully funded financing. The short of it is, that you actually have to have a viably business model to get the attention of the VC’s now. Imagine that. We’re in the midst (in case you haven’t noticed) of a shift from packaged applications to selling the service that the software provides.

Hopefully Bill’s slides will be online with the rest of the conference presentations. I highly recommend that you check it out if it’s there. Make sure that you take a look through the various presentations up there. While it’s not the same as being here, you’ll expand your horizons for sure.

Some session highlights from today: GeoURL.org is a project about geospatial markup and distributed geographic annotation that has an open API that you can integrate into your own apps. Localfeeds.com picks up RSS feeds based on blogs in a certain area by using the GeoURL information. This is a great example of how the technology can be used to cause very real social concerns to take place. An email was shown from someone that wanted to make the GeoURL folks aware of the fact that people and governments can use this information to find people in oppressed countries and providing dictatorships with a tool to find and arrest these free-thinkers. There is an entire uncharted area that we are treading on here and people’s live can and will be tremendously affected. Another side effect of this is yet another form of spam, GeoSpam. Those spammers are the first to pick up on new technologies; to bad they can’t do something useful with it. Since every device has (or will have) an IP address as well as a Geo URL, every point of interest can be available and can have targeted advertising. The humorous map showing about 100 McDonald’s golden arches on a map display, to the point that you couldn’t even see the map, is both sad and true.

This brings us to another topic, geolocation on the internet and architectures for privacy and security. First, what is geolocation? It is a spatial location which might correspond to a person, a business, a parcel, but it can described in many ways. For example, a postal address, coordinate space, proximity to landmarks, or a place type (at a movie, on an airplane). Then there are also granularities like continent vs. country vs. city vs. intersection. Technologies being used include: manually entering your Lat/Lon, guess based on IP address (like how you get redirected to a regional server on some sites), GPS, cell towers for cell phones, and 802.11 base stations which will be here soon. The types of applications we’ll see (actually are already seeing today) that use geolocation information include stuff like -web apps employing geolocation, friend finder apps on the cell phone, voice over IP (VoIP) has requirements for location information, location based games, and of course some annoying advertising as you walk past a store to tell you what’s on sale.

While this conference has been a total blast (incase you couldn’t tell from my blogs…), the thing I liked best about it was the complete free flowing of energy and information. With a collection of alpha geeks like this, there could be room for some pretty bloated egos. But in fact, this was probably the best people networking conference I’ve attended (and I attend a lot). Everyone here was eager to exchange ideas, thoughts, and projects with others. There were so many business cards changing hands that you didn’t need to bother putting yours away. It was a great time. Now you understand why we tell people it snows all the time in Denver.

While it’s hard to admit, the Redmond machine has some pretty interesting stuff going on in the labs. As Marc Smith, from Microsoft research labs, noted in his keynote he was out on work release to talk about catalyzing collective action on the net. Actually he’s a research sociologist looking into how social cyberspace is an emerging environment that resembles a biological system. This of course is not referring to all (or at least most) of our desks that have any number of coffee cups growing something in it. We’ve seen communities, group(ware), networks, and worlds evolve, but what he’s talking about is a whole other class of systems.

Networks are coming together in ad-hoc way to get things done, but they aren’t really groups because they are too big. More like voluntary associations. In most collective efforts, there are a minimal set of people that actually get anything done, and others are ‘minimum’ members. This all add ups to Yphrum’s law – Murphy spelled backwards - which describes systems that shouldn’t work, but sometimes do, or at least work fairly well. Marc’s group is working on figuring out the type of plumbing that’s needed in an online environment for conversation communities. So things like discovery, selection, evaluation, motivation all come into play in the social networking. Really what we want to do is pick an online group like we pick a restaurant. Walk past it, read the menu, take a look at what people are eating, evaluate if it looks good, and ask ourselves do we feel like eating that tonight? There are a whole host of factors that go into our decision without thinking about it. For example when looking at usenet, (or used to use net), some wonder if it’s still around. Take a look at part of the netscan visualization project to see that activity by adding metadata to the information. It’s definitely still around.

However, what I found extremely compelling is the Aura project. Ok, I do realize that I’m linking to an aspx page here on a Java site, but it is worth the mention and should make us think and take a look at these types of applications in the Java space. The Aura project is dealing with linking online information to physical objects using barcode tags and other sensor data. You can create an application platform that is driven by the tag data. So if you have a barcode attachment on your cell phone, you can walk past an art exhibit in a gallery and get all the information about the artist, the type of media, maybe do a search on a WAP browser or click on links that might provide further information from someone’s blog who had already been through the exhibit. The question is how do you link people to their shared objects and places? Make it simple to build collective knowledge about things. This is a very compelling area for some very interesting applications.

In other points of interest, Danny O’Brien gave a most amusing session on Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks. He did a survey of a 100 questions to various geeks to see how they organized themselves. He noticed that we are a bare minimalist group. I guess everyone was laughing at some of his slides (or more the images of his notecards) because we all saw a piece of ourselves up on the screen. While one might think that there is some secret killer productivity tool out there, it all comes down to what we all know and love. Todo.txt. That and the fact that the alpha geeks write everything in shell scripts that replace departments at companies.

In the social mobility space, take a look at Dodgeball.com which is a opt-in location tracking. It focuses on landmarks and takes advantage of text messaging to only push content to people that can act on it. They have some interesting ideas even though it seems to be focused on only the NYC area.

Nelson Minar gave some interesting insights into what really goes on under the covers at Google. Although most of the audience questions that really dug under the covers didn’t get a straight answer (to no ones surprise), but still it was interesting to hear about a couple of the 100+ factors that go into a page ranking. We got some insight into the indexing and doc server shards and replications as well as some interesting things that can be done through one box results in Google. Stuff like doing flight and package tracking, phone numbers and street maps, VIN #’s, UPC codes, FCC, and patents. And then there’s the google calculator that can do unit conversions and the all important hex to roman numeral conversion. Try it I’m not kidding. At least the engineers still have fun there.

Other things of fun included sitting in on the FOAF (friend of a friend) project. This is a project were people related to each other by relationships are described in a machine readable format. It’s basically a RDF markup for a persons inbox, homepage, workplace, etc. You can then link to other FOAF files. It’s interesting because FOAF is using RDF/XML documents, and has a vocabulary of over 50 terms. The FOAF files can then be used in other RDF files.

Tomorrow ETech wraps up, but there are some really interesting sessions all the way to the end of the show. I’ll get to as many as I can before I have to catch my plane, but check back for tomorrow’s wrap-up.

It is always fun to listen to Tim O’Reilly speak. He opened today’s keynote with what’s on the O’Reilly radar. He described how new technology emerges and the hackers push the limits. Then someone takes those insights and makes the technology easier for users and it gets incorporated into ubiquitous platforms. Then the hackers move on to the next thing. So here’s where we’re talking about what’s on the radar. We’re moving into the world of where software is ‘somewhere else’, not necessary what’s on your desk or in your lap. The internet is the platform, it’s the services not the packaged applications that we’re interested in. The platform players are the ones accessible via web services API’s and the data aggregators and the user contributions. We’re talking about using the user base to find what’s best, the social networking aspects. Harnessing the power of the user community, like Amazon (using ratings, and things like listmania). The most successful apps will be those that take advantage of those social services. While we’ve seen web services around for awhile now, it’s as if the can of worms is finally being opened, and it’s very exciting.

Social software, is one of the main tracks at this year’s conference. After the search for the holy grail of the killer app for all these years, is it really people after all that becomes the killer app? Take a look at sites like Meetup.com and Moveon.org for information on how social organizations have figured out how to leverage the internet and point people at a project. Wordspy.com is a great example of pop culture in action. It gives a dictionary style entry for words as they emerge, so if you want to know what bluejacking is, go check it out. Bluejacking has been going on in almost every session here at the conference, which has been quite amusing at times.

Many of you might have already heard of Orkut.com by now to organize friends into groups. How do we manage our relationships? Has anyone really figured this out yet? The joke today was ‘Are YOU my friend?! Yes or no. If you’re on orkut, your understand why.

But I have to admit, one of the best examples of social networking in the wireless space was this (as Tim explained): A company called FirstMile in Ratanakiri, Cambodia. 5 guys ride around on motorcycles with antennas attached to the back of their bikes. They drive around for 100’s of miles each day. While they are traveling they pick up emails on their antenna and that’s the wireless service for some areas. Talk about the hacking spirit.

Helen Greiner, founder of iRobot, builds robots like roomba (that robotic floorVac that you see traveling around the rooms) as well as military robots, wants to make robots part of the mainstream. When you think about it, there’s an aweful lot of technology going into that little vacuum. The technology is the navigation (coverage algorithms, wall following using specialized infrared sensors, edge detection so it doesn’t fall down the stairs, escape algorithms (areas where the robot can get in, but how does it get out?), cleaning (edge cleaning, transitioning from carpet to hard wood, linoleum, low power). It was a pretty impressive demonstration on what’s available today, and the types of robot research going on. Tactical mobile robots used for military operations like searching for booby traps, bombs, chemical agents, and dangerous situations like bomb disposal for people. PackBot, can send back pictures of the situation. A round of applause was given when the video was running showing the PackBot being tossed out of buildings, thrown threw windows, going underwater, and still being able to have the robot right itself and continue on. Think of that next time you bounce your laptop off your table and then need to get the duct tape out. Another video clip showed a beta of swarms of robots that can aggregate as a totally distributed hardware system in real time. Pretty cool stuff. Robotic trends seem to be that they are now affordable, have communities, their own hack sites, and are finally going mainstream.

If you haven’t checked out Technorati, which is a web services for bloggers, you might want to get a cup of coffee and take it for a spin. Some infoporn (check wordspy.com if you need to know what it means), over 11,000 new weblogs tracked/day one every 7.8 seconds (ok, so about 35% are abandoned weblogs) over 100,000 updates per day. Median time from a weblog post to live index is 7 minutes. The bottom line is that you’re able to see what is being talked about. But the interesting thing is how technorati is combining searching, social commentary, products, and rankings all under one roof. Take a look at this page to see how the web is being annotating in real time. It’s almost an archeological dig because you’re looking at information by time, not by authority. You can see how links start becoming established, and then see the trends. It’s an interesting to look at information from a ‘contagent’ perspective. We did a real-time experiment with everyone in the room blogging and then seeing it show up on technorati with its stat’s. With Blogpower you can see how many inbound links you have and who really is the blog with the most power. It’s a great way to see how you are reaching people, even if you’ve only got 5 links.

Technorati isn’t just a destination site, but it’s also a platform and has XML API’s for all functionality and a non-commercial free-to-use license. Take a further look at the developer site if you’re interested.

An interesting note was made about the vote links. If you link to something implicitly you are endorsing it, but what if you’re linking to something that you don’t want to endorse? You can set your vote to -1 to sites that you don’t want to endorse. By setting a vote=’-1” in your href tag as an attribute. However, someone in the audience made an interesting observation – ‘What about extending this to be NOT bipolar, -1,0,+1 but have an infrastructure to express a range’ Good point. Do we always have to be so black and white about everything. I think not.

While you’re on technorati, don’t missing the beta of the breaking news feature. Give it a whirl and let them know what you think. Breaking news, use the news aggregates from the professional sources and uses the bloggers as your filters, so that becomes the latest breaking news. What’s the difference between breaking news and current events? The most recent article that people are talking about first will have the most staying power.

Another interesting session was ‘Untethering the social network or what happens to social networks in the untethered wilds?’ This was a panel discussion about making mobile services user hackable. Mobile email, picture messaging, and messaging is changing the way that social contact takes place. Mobile social networking is different than that in the pc space. It is a more intimate group, done on a smaller scale. It fits into the ‘haircut genre’, as in sending a picture of your new haircut to your significant other while they are on the train or at work. Use simple technologies to conduct new social network that emerged from the user space. Users are able to take a simple tool set and develop rich social networks. In this session it was amusing to watch the IRC channel traffic as you could send something directly to the heckle box, which was a scrolling LCD. With all of the laptops tapping, the IRC channel, and the presentation all going at the same time, it made you feel like you were in the land of the ultimate ADD audience.

As you can see, there is a lot going on here and it's very exciting. This conference is one of the very reasons that it makes you realize why it's great to be a geek. I didn’t even touch on the mobile hack session or the collaborative mapping project yet. More tomorrow.

The digital democracy teach-in was a whole other beast. It was actually pretty interesting to see how the political process here in the States, and around the world, is being affected by the technology and how bloggers have been used to build a political community. I have to say, this was a room of alpha bloggers. In one conference I’ve never heard as many tapping laptops at the same time with everyone on wi-fi. Of the 400 people in the room, 399 of them had laptops going, and the one person that didn’t was probably in the batheroom. The part I sat in on was talking about the Dean campaign and how it formed Blogstate – a set of bloggers who can emerge that can stand for a candidate. This is something that hadn't exisited before as it did in the Dean campaign. Can it really make the difference in who becomes the leader of the free world? A few comments were made to read the bloggers that you least agree with first and then take back the democracy using blogs. While the whole discussion was interesting (and very animated) personally I thought that some of the bloggers making their statements were more interesting in hearing their own voices and full of themselves, then moving the cause forward. I’d rather see some of these bloggers reach outside the blogging world to empower people then just talk blogger to blogger. What was far more interesting was how these technologies can help emergent governments and help people getting involved at a local level. While political blogging can cause a ground swell, do the political bloggers put just a bit to much weight in what is being said vs. what is being done? Do bloggers really represent the echo chambers? They might be hearing each other from the right and left, but does the middle listen or are those middle folks just reading what’s thrown on their front porch every morning anyway? I guess I left that part of the session with a lot of questions still, but what was clear was that this was an extremely interesting way to bring technology and politics’ together for discussion.

In the afternoon I sat in Russell Beatties J2ME and Web Services tutorial. It was a small, but very enthusiastic group and it definitely was a lot of fun. There was so much Bluetooth going on in that room, for a minute I thought I might actually have to put on a lead vest. If you’d like to take a look at the progression of source code that was built, including an RSS reader, Google searcher, and Amazon author search (all for a SonyEricson device), you can download it from http://www.russellbeattie.com/projects.zip . More fun to come tomorrow when ETech is in full swing.

I'm also looking forward to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in a few weeks in San Diego. I'll be blogging coverage for java.net, and it should be pretty exciting conference to take part in. If you haven't heard of it, check out the link, and if you're able to attend well, that will even be better.

His laptop was running the beta version (and the results of Project Madhatter), of the new Sun Java Desktop. That’s right, Desktop. Let’s just say that you don’t need to be a lawyer to see the fangs from the Microsoft legal team already bared to file a lawsuit for something related to ‘look and feel’ infringement. But hey, I’m sure Sun has its own set of legal eagles, so they must have already had a good hard look at this. The Java Desktop looks just like the familiar world of Windows except for a number of key points; it’s all written in Java, and it provides an authenticated desktop. It also provides a well integrated environment for those who want a familiar experience with their MS applications. This was demonstrated by opening up a the quarterly results of Microsoft off the web and playing the animation in Powerpoint (in a StarOffice viewer), right off the Java Desktop. This authenticated desktop will be shipping in the next 30 days.

It seems Sun has also redone their entire license, pricing, and software packaging structure. If you are reading this, and you’re responsible for software purchases and licensing for your company, your life just got a whole lot simpler, so find out more details on this. The new pricing and licensing structure that will be seen throughout all products is really an attempt to make the Java Desktop a true market alternative. The customer target is only those customers who are cost and security conscience. So we should see a rather aggressive campaign here. I thought all of this was quite interesting because I haven’t been paying much attention to the Desktop efforts. I’m sure there will be some massive press releases about this, but the Java Desktop looks to be a cool alternative to having all of your desktops infected by the next Windows super virus.

But the real demo that had the Borcon crowd of 3,000+ ooohing and ahhing…was the demo of Project Looking Glass. This had even a greater wow factor than Microsoft’s demo the day before of the Longhorn beta with some of the cool new graphics and file system features coming from the Avalon subsystem …although when it will be coming is still anybody’s guess. Sun is going to give them a run for their money, which is great news. With a 3D screen display, translucent to opaque windows on mouse-overs, and this totally cool feature…click on an open window regardless of what is contained in the window (graphic, text, streaming media) and the window will flip around to allow for notes to be taken on it. This got a large round of applauses. But that wasn’t all; the windows can be rotated, flipped, angled and tilted on the screen for position however you like in order to keep your workspaces organized and keep your desktop uncluttered while still having visual access to information. While it will be hard to figure out who wants their windows upside down when playing streaming media, the gratuitous rotations were duly noted for their cool factor.

There are also other cool things like video-live icons and workspace organization that allow anything in the file systems to become a logical part of a workspace. I for one (and probably many in the keynote audience) will be on the lookout for the production release of these features. It would have been nice if some of this was ready last June to demo and wow the JavaOne crowd, but I can assure you that it will wow you when you see it.

There were also many new things in the mobile arena, but I’m going to save all that for another blog.

We’ve had a really good time together over the past 20 years. There’s never been just one of you of course. My debuggers have changed languages many times. First, it was Pascal, then C, then C++, and now, naturally, Java. But throughout our relationship, your purpose in my life has always remained the same. You helped me weed out those nasty bugs and make my code shine like the sun. Now the time has come to reevaluate the time we spend together.

We’ve spent hours and hours frolicking at breakpoints, contemplating the meaning of the stack, and chatting into the wee hours of the morning. We’ve danced, stepped into, and stepped over who knows how many methods and lines of code. As I look back, there is no development tool that could ever take your place in my heart. However, it seems over the last year or two we are spending less and less time with each other. How should I tell you this? My time is now spent with my test cases.

Test driven development has reduced the need, or requirement, for me to be in the debugger. While maybe not eliminating the need for you altogether, it recently dawned on me that I rarely have to fire up the debugger at all. After all, if you are writing test cases before you are writing code there’s nothing to debug. As you start writing the code, the test cases will validate your code for you. By doing frequent, short iterations and running your tests after each and every change, you find many bugs immediately. If you don’t find these bugs early, they can turn into hard to track down problems later on in the development cycle. With tools such as JUnit and the whole JUnit family (Cactus, HTTPUnit, etc) available, unit test cases have become automated and repeatable. The more I’ve gotten into the TDD habit; the less and less I’ve actually been in the debugger. Which is just fine by me. Because however much I loved my debugger, seeing the green bar is much more of a joy.

While I can’t tell you, my dear debugger, when we’ll meet again, I can tell you that you definitely served your purpose and your keystroke commands are ingrained in my brain for all eternity.

The gist of her pitch was to tell me how the company she works for reduces the costs of software development for many Fortune 500 companies. I politely asked her if her company was an offshore IT outsource setup. ‘Well yes’, she answered. That is all I needed to hear. I have some pretty strong opinions (as many of us do) on the whole ‘outsourcing’ thing and started to tell her them. After all, she called me. I clearly indicated that I was definitely not interested in using their services, but she continued to ask me if I’d be interested in arranging another call so she could tell me what they could do for my company. What part of ‘I’ve got perfectly good engineers and IT staff working for my company and I’m not interested in your services’ didn’t she understand? That’s when I just flat out hung up. But is it really enough to just hang-up on these folks? I think not.

I’m fortunate enough that I actually own my company so I don’t have to deal with the political sewage that frequently seeps down in many companies. The entire situation in this country dealing with the outsourcing of our high-tech industry boils my blood. I am a true believe that the legislation currently being proposed to lower the H-1B and L-1B visa quotas will not go far enough. I think these visas should be abolished until all of the unemployed and laid-off IT workers and engineers who are US citizens are back on a payroll. The fact that a US company thinks that hiring a barely-English-speaking worker in India or the Philippines is going to solve their competitive problems is just absurd. This is such a shortsighted solution that it makes me sick to think that the people in these corporations actually think that they are making sound business decisions. When the high-tech people being displaced by these policies don’t have the income to purchase the products being made off-shore, who exactly, Mr. and Ms. CxO, do you think is going to buy your stuff? You think the worker in India is going to run out and buy it? I doubt it. I’m not speaking as a disgruntled engineer who has been laid off; I’ve avoided that fate which makes me, unfortunately, unusual among my friends. I’m speaking from experience, both as consumer and as a developer dealing with offshore companies.

Are all outsourcing companies a total waste? I doubt it, I’m sure there are some stellar engineers working at some of these companies. Just as there are stellar engineers all over the world. Do I want, or need, to work with them from my office in the US to successfully complete a project? I don’t think so. Will using an offshore development team save money? I can tell you from my experience, it was exactly the opposite.

From a consumer’s point of view, I recently needed support from Symantec Corporation because of a serious problem I was having on my machine caused by one of their products. I bought and downloaded a virus checker, which completely roached my machine. First I got the email support, which was clearly a form letter, of things to try from Manjunath C, Symantec Authorized Technical Support. I can only assume that my complaint was handled through an offshore call center. Ok, I can deal with that, but what annoyed me no end was that I had initially emailed very detailed symptoms and a description of the problem. I am, after all, an engineer.

When the suggestions sent in their form letter didn’t work, I emailed back (again) very specific symptoms, and got the same exact email back. As you might expect, I was quite annoyed since I wasn’t even able to boot my machine because of their product. After more than 5 days of this because they wanted me to pay to be able to talk to a person, I uninstalled the product, demanded a refund, and switched to another vendor. I believe that had Semantic support been here in the States, I could have dialed them (I wouldn’t even ask for a toll-free number at this point), spoken to someone and either have gotten a fix for the problem or resolved it some other way. Perhaps I still would have had to remove the program, gotten a refund and switched vendors, but Semantic sure would have understood the problem that I doubt I’m the only person to have had. Was this just a case of bad technical support, or was it because the training the offshore worker got was focused only within some predetermined parameters? That’s the difference between having a worker, and having an experienced worker. The price that I paid for Symantec having just a worker was 5 days of downtime for my business. And note to anyone from Semantic who might read this: I won’t be using your stuff again for a very, very long time, if ever.

This same sort of difficulty in dealing with customer support happened to me too in dealing with HP recently where a conversation that should have taken less than 5 minutes took more than 20 because of the heavy accent on the part of the offshore worker handling the Accounts Payable for HP. I was able to tell where he was located due to the hp.india.com return address of his email.. Why should I be forced to lose money (my time is money also) while other companies think they have a right to save it? And by the way to HP: having an AP rep on the phone for 20 minutes from India to Colorado is not, perhaps, the cost savings you folks intended.

I want to be very clear; I have no problem working with anyone of any nationality. In fact, most of my career has been spent working with teams located around the globe. What I do have a problem with is working with people who are being hired as ‘cheap’ labor who clearly aren’t qualified or and can be very hard to understand to handle the business situation or transaction required. While many of us in the industry feel like we are being dragged through the wringer and have no choice when dealing with the whole offshore situation. I’d like to suggest that we, as an industry, have a number of choices. Here are a few:

• When you are asked to train the foreign worker to do your job or to support your product line because in 6-8 months they will be doing your job (or the job of a co-worker), simply refuse. And if you must, quit the job. No two weeks notice, just flat out quit. While this might seem like a drastic measure, you’re going to lose your job anyway so does it really matter? At least you’ll leave on your own terms and not be labeled as a disposable worker, not to mention leaving with some dignity. Let companies understand the value that we bring to the success of business in this country.
• When you are about to buy a product, call the company and ask them if they outsource their IT and their customer support before you make the purchase. If they do, then simply don’t buy the product. But make sure you write an email or letter to the CEO or President and let them know flat out why you didn’t buy the product. American companies will listen when their wallets are being squeezed. Maybe we should start industry-wide and consumer aware boycotts of these companies and publicly supporting those companies that support the American high-tech worker. If enough people stop buying the products that are built and/or supported by offshore companies, then I think that American companies will start to listen.
• Last but not least, write your congress-people, your Rep and your Senators. I’m sending a copy of this blog to mine right now. Let them know that the issuing of foreign worker visas in the high-tech industry has to stop. Either that, or make it financially unattractive for companies to do so by hitting them with a ‘we’re screwing the high-tech American worker and we know it’ tax. At least we’ll have it all out in the open for what it is.

JUGs also make it quick and easy to keep up on new and interesting technologies. There are usually monthly meetings that provide presentations on various Java related issues. I'm doing a presentation for the Denver JUG tomorrow on the upcoming J2EE 1.4 Web Foundation technologies. This will give people a heads up on what's coming down the pike for JSP 2.0 and Servlets 2.4. Other topics that we've seen on the Denver calendar include Mike Clark talking about Bitter EJB, Ben Sullins talking about JMX, and an upcoming presentation by Grady Booch. Check out the local listings for a JUG near you and see what types of things you can learn. I'm sure there is something that will catch your attention. At the very least, you'll have a new place to ask questions and provide answers for your peers.

As with anything else, if you don't have a JUG in your area yet, make it happen yourself. There is no reason why a couple of folks can't get together and start a group. You'll be surprised how fast the group will probably grow.

For example, I’m about to take off on a 550 mile, 7-day bicycle tour. Some might think that mileage is on the crazy side, but I literally think of it as 27 (ok 27.5) x 20-mile rides. Ok, so I’m in denial, but that seems like a much more manageable number. This is the same scenario we apply when using XP or Test-Driven Development (TDD). We take a complicated problem and break it down into its most basic parts, and then work iteratively from there. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where all of the basic parts equal the more complex scenarios. If you want to take a look at how XP and/or TDD actually is used (and works), check out the agile alliance where you’ll find plenty of pointers and resources.

I find myself injecting software development process into many aspects of my life without even realizing it. I frequently speak with Dave Thomas at various conferences, and have listened to him talk about the broken window theory. While this is a theory that was applied in a socio-economic environment, it fits into the software lifecycle as well. Nobody wants to be the engineer who takes the nice, neat, clean, tested code and breaks the window. I actually applied the broken window theory to another part of my life to see if I could keep my closet neat. This has been an on-going project since I’ve been about 5. I thought if I keep everything folded, then by magic they would stay folded, and new laundry would fold itself. By and large it really works. I’m going on about 6 months now of actually being able to find the shirt in my closet I’m looking for and it is (relatively) wrinkle free. Six months is a personal-best record for me. The point (and I’m pretty sure I had one) is that we can apply facets of our work to our lives, and how we live our lives to our work.

So I’d like to thank Dave for helping me keep my closet neat. If only my mother was able to locate him when I was 5.

While I haven’t seen the source code for the java.net site, hopefully it is taking advantage of JSP best practices and not hard-coding English strings into the pages. Using standard J2SE ResourceBundle, we should be able to use and take advantage of formatting actions in the JSTL so that all displayed text comes from specific resource bundles. If in fact the JSTL is currently being used on the site, we should be able to create a new java.net project so that various ResourceBundle files are open-sourced that can then be translated by members of the community (as Eduardo suggested). Not only will this encourage participation from community members around the world, but we’d have a site that showcases some of the latest Java web development technologies.

I fully understand that this is an incredibly dynamic site (information-wise), but dynamic content is what it’s all about. If we can’t accommodate the requirements of handling dynamic content in multiple languages, then how can we expect other Java developers to? If there are members of the java.net web development team reading this, maybe you can add some comments if something similar to this approach is in the works?