Van Riper's Blog

Michael Van Riper has a Bachelors in Computer Science from MIT. Van has more than 25 years of experience as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. He was a core member of the engineering team at Adobe that built the award winning Adobe PageMill web authoring program. Since 1999, he has focused on developing web applications in Java. He is currently a Principal Engineer at Krillion in Mountain View, California. He is also the founder and co-leader of the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG.

JavaOne Day Two - Personal Highlights

Helping a high school student get a Sun SPOT from Sun for his school computer club has to be number one. The Java Champions BOF was pretty interesting. I wonder how many people know you don't have to be a Java Champion to attend this BOF. Bob Brewin, the Sun CTO, was taking questions from the Java Champions for the first half of this session. I was also fortunate to receive an invite to attend the NLJUG meeting with James Gosling at noon. On the party front, The Eclipse party at the Thirsty Bear was my favorite. However, I only attended 3 of the many parties going on that night. =)

If you are a developer working on the part of the system that end users interact with, I highly recommend the talk by Ben Galbraith on creating a compelling user experience (TS-6929). I did a fair amount of interaction design work earlier in my career. I found his content spot on with respect to educating user interface developers on what they should learn themselves and what aspects really benefit from the input of a user experience specialist.

I stumbled onto an interesting company, Pervasive Software, simply because they had a novel pen that clips easily to your badge holder and I had lost my pen. In return for the pen, I spent some time at their small booth and was impressed with what I saw. Without writing any special code, they have a solution (Pervasive DataRush) that will transparently take full advantage of multi-core processors for computation intensive tasks. It was pretty cool.

There is much more to write about, but, I will have to update this entry later. It is time to start drinking from the JavaOne fire hose for yet another day.

JavaOne Day One - Personal Highlights

Seeing JavaFX applications running on Android. Attending the JavaFX overview session by Christopher Oliver. Seeing Neil Young talk about the project to make his vast archive of musical work available using Java and Blue Ray technologies. He had been waiting since the 80's for the right combination of hardware and software technology to do this.

Technically, the three most interesting things for me on Tuesday were:

• JavaFX has come a long way since the initial splash at last year's conference. I will have to give it a serious look now.
• GlassFish V3 Kernel with a lightweight web profile looks interesting. I would sure like to see this as the basis for a Google App Engine Java Runtime. :-)
• Although not a new announcement at JavaOne, I was able to learn more about the SpringSource Application Platform directly from the SpringSource folks and it looks promising.

My last presentation for the week was over just in time for the evening reception in the JavaOne Pavilion. The demo gods were not smiling on me with network connectivity issues again. I should have learned by now to *never* count on network connectivity for a successful demo at a conference. Sigh!

In the evening, I attended the JUG Community BOF where we had a lively discussion. The most interesting thing I learned there was the promise that new infrastructure is coming real soon (sometime this summer) for us to use when hosting JUG projects on java.net. I'm supposed to get a preview demo of the capabilities of this new infrastructure later this week. I am looking forward to that.

JavaOne Day Zero AKA CommunityOne

This year's CommunityOne was definitely an upgrade over last year. I thought it was pretty good last year too. The price/performance (free) was excellent and the turnout was good. My one gripe as a presenter was the lack of internet connectivity for my session.

Speaking of my session, it went well. Sun even surprised us by providing a second Sun SPOT so that there were two lucky JUGs that won in the raffle at the end of the session. We had 40 JUG Leaders easily in the room. Some pictures were taken that I'll post here eventually.

When I went to MIT, they had a saying that getting an education there was like drinking from a firehose. I find the experience at CommunityOne/JavaOne to be similar. There are so many options it is almost overwhelming.

Personally, I wanted to attend the Startup Camp and had to miss a critical part of the startup speedgeeking contest due to overlaps with my own session. I sent this tweet about the winner of the Best Startup contest earlier today.

There was also another unconference going on in addition to Startup Camp. Which is on top of the 10 or so parallel technical tracks running all day long including hands-on labs. The day ended with a nice reception (much better than the one last year).

I'm looking forward to a full day tomorrow. I have heard rumors that there will be some interesting demos at the keynote session in the morning. We shall see. You can find me tomorrow in the CommunityCorner giving my mini-talk on the Java User Groups International Map at 6pm.

Finally, I admit it. I'm the classic geek that collects t-shirts at conferences. I may set a new personal record this year. I wasn't even trying and I came back to my room with four new shirts today. At this rate, I'm going to need to buy an extra piece of luggage to cart them all home. :-)

The Most Amazing Thing Of All

... is I get paid for doing this. I'm not actually paid to run my JUG, but, my company supports my involvement including giving me paid time off to attend the full JavaOne conference each year.

JavaOne is next week and it is going to be so much fun. In particular, I am looking forward to spending time with the other JUG Leaders attending JavaOne from all over the world. I had no idea when I started my own JUG back in 2003 that it would catapult me into such a neat community of intelligent and caring people within the world wide Java User Group Community.

If you ever thought about starting a Java User Group (JUG) of your own, I highly recommend that you attend the JUG Community Panel at CommunityOne on Monday and/or the JUG Community BOF on Tuesday at JavaOne. I don't want to sugar coat it. There is a lot of work involved in running a JUG. For me personally, I am at a point where the rewards greatly surpass the demands of the job.

My advice to anyone considering starting a JUG is to not go it alone. Locally, it is important to find other like-minded individuals to help you build up your local group. Otherwise, it is very easy to burn out. I am so grateful that I found Kevin Nilson to co-lead the Silicon Valley Web JUG. By the way, we are always on the look out for others with energy and passion to join us running our JUG.

Globally, there are many resources available to you through the vibrant international JUG community. The best way to get started is to create a user account at java.net and join the JUG Leaders mailing list. You don't need to have a JUG already up and running to join. In fact, you will probably benefit the most from getting connected to the JUG Leaders community before getting started. You will find the mailing list to be a great source of advice and support.

If you are attending JavaOne next week, I strongly recommend that you visit the Community Corner in the JavaOne Pavilion. You will typically find a mix of JUG Leaders and Java Champions hanging out there pretty much anytime during the conference. Check it out!

Java™ User Groups: Think Globally, Act Locally

This JUG Community panel session I organized was accepted for CommunityOne. Yes! The slides and the resource links are available now for this session.

It is not too late to register for CommunityOne being held on May 5th at Moscone Center. CommunityOne attendees will enjoy free access to the JavaOne Pavilion and General Sessions on Tuesday, May 6th. Registration is free, but space is limited, so save your spot today. Tell them I sent you by entering W0977217 as your referral code when signing up.

Redmonk will again be organizing an unconference track during CommunityOne. So, that session you failed to submit by the deadline could still happen as part of the unconference component of the day. Or that session you were hoping to see that is not listed on the schedule for the day can still be proposed as part of the unconference.

Personally, I'm looking forward to having Lunch with the Java Posse again this year. There are technical sessions planned covering the full gamut from OpenSolaris, Glassfish and OpenJDK on one end of the spectrum to Ruby, Python and PHP at the other end. The day ends with a reception from 6pm until 7:30pm. If you want to say hello, I'll be hangin' with the other JUG Leaders by the bean bag chairs at the foot of the escalators around 7pm.

Google App Engine: Request Java Runtime

I was at the Google Campfire One event on April 7th where Google App Engine was officially launched. The whole thing was recorded. So, you didn't miss anything except for the *cold*. Good thing there were camp fires and hot chocolate. Brrrr! Anyway, it sounds like a real sweet and free web application hosting environment. The problem is the only runtime supported initially is Python. However, you can show some Java love by starring this issue that asks Google to add Java support.

Important Note: Please do *not* add a "+1" comment to this issue like many others have already done. All that is necessary is to star the issue. Comments are intended to provide more information about an issue and everyone that stars an issue sees these comments. So, it ends up generating essentially spam email for everyone that has starred the issue.

For persistent storage, you will have access to the same BigTable data storage used by Google's internal applications. You can query your data using GQL. GQL is a SQL-like language for retrieving data entities from the App Engine scalable datastore. While GQL's features are different from those of a query language for a traditional relational database, the GQL syntax is similar to that of SQL.

My favorite part of the evening launch event was Guido van Rossum discussing why he joined the project. I particularly enjoyed his sense of humor starting around the 3:20 mark on this segment of the recording.

If you would like to be one of the first 10K beta testers, you had better sign up right now. If they are not all taken already, I expect those beta accounts to be gone soon.

May 2008

Search this blog:

Categories

Archives

May 2008
April 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
June 2007

Recent Entries

JavaOne Day Two - Personal Highlights

JavaOne Day One - Personal Highlights

JavaOne Day Zero AKA CommunityOne

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.