Juggy The Java Finch's Blog

February 2007 Archives

NetBeans Evangelists at JavaPolis

I visited the Czech Republic last year, where I met the guys from NetBeans and was even invited to be part of the NetBeans 5.5 launch party. While I was there, I visit this beautiful city, Český Krumlov, and talked a lot with several Java guys that were there, including the team of NetBeans Evangelists, and also Joshua Marinacci, that sent me these cool pictures.

    

Then, during JavaPolis, I met a few of the NetBeans guys again, and took the time to learn little bit more about this very very cool open source project.

Roman Strobl is one of the best known NetBeans evangelists. He is also a very well read blogger, among the best 10 at Sun. Want to be a better blogger? You need to learn Roman's secret then!

Now, this next interview is a special one. Brian Leonard is a NetBeans evangelist. But he is also the guy I interviewed most times! I interviewed him at the NetBeans party. Video was too dark to use. I interviewed him twice more at Czech Republic. For some reason, those videos disappeared, they were nowhere to be found on the camera. I owned to him to get this one finalized! Brian talks about JEE support in NetBeans and also about support for other open source technologies in the IDE.

Thanks Roman and Brian. Keep up the good work at NetBeans, and please visit Java User Groups around the world in your travels!

Open Source Projects at JavaPolis

JavaPolis was a great event, and I wanted to learn about open source projects. Is there a better way to learn then to go talk with the people responsible for the projects?

Talking with Mark Reinhold, I learned that JDK 6 was released and that OpenJDK was open sourced. To really understand the importance of this, I had to go hear what Dalibor Topic had to say about this.

Dalibor is the leader of the Kaffe Virtual Machine Project, probably the longest run open source effort to implement the Java specifications. He took some time to explain to me what Kaffe is, and what he thinks OpenJDK will bring to the open source community. Dalibor thinks that JUGs can have an important participation on those initiatives.

My talk with Heather VanCura got me thinking that I should learn more about the JCP. So, I had this idea to look for Geir Magnusson: as representative of Apache at the JCP, and also as leader of the Harmony Project, Geir would sure have lots to tell me about all that. Geir talked to me just a few minutes before his talk and sure enough, he talked about the JCP, and he also showed me how important Harmony is. He was very happy about OpenJDK too.

Once you do like me and visit Java User Groups all over the world, you start to learn that beer is as much part of JUGs as Java. When I saw Marc Fleury serving (and drinking) beer at the Red Hat booth at JavaPolis, I knew he was the right guy to talk to! We talked about JBoss and RedHat, and he even admitted that it was not only beer that was getting over his head!

Nothing beats learning directly from people. Thank you Dalibor, Geir and Marc for sharing your ideas with all of us!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.