Boulder JUG

February 7th, 2012 -- Joda Time and Guava

Join us in February for a night with Daniel Hinojosa, who will present Joda Time in our first slot and the Guava library in our second.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponshorship of the room. Big Sky Technology run the ÜberConf and No Fluff, No Stuff conferences.

We are also thankful for TekSystems' sponsorship's of the pizza and drinks.

JetBrains' and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207

2450 Kittredge Loop Road

Boulder, CO 80309  

Directions can be found here.

6:00-7:00: Joda Time and a Brief History of the World

JodaTime is Java Date/Time and Calendering done right. There are many problems with the original Date/Time API that came prepackaged in the early Java days. There are even more problems with the subsequent Calendar API.One of the obvious issues is that Calendar is mutable and can unintentionally be changed. Another issue is that constructing Calendars in Java involves setting certain fields at certain times during coding, but not always getting the expected result. Joda Time repairs those issues and offers a robust and immutable date, time, and duration API.

In Joda Time and a Brief History of the World, I provide a quick rundown of calendaring throughout the centuries, describe UTC, compare UTC to GMT, discuss how time is calculated, and then dive into Joda Time in every popular JVM language. The end result provides the audience with compelling proof that Joda Time should always be their Date Time API of choice.

7:00-7:30: Food, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to TekSystems for their continued sponsorship of the Food and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Making Java Bearable with Guava

The presentation covers the Guava library developed by Google. Guava provides collection extensions to the Java Collection API and, along with this, a cornucopia of time-saving utilities that bring Java as close as possible to some of the more functional and dynamic language competitors like Scala, Ruby, and Clojure. The presentation focuses on the following topics: how to make Predicates and Functions; how to use new collection constructs that make life easier, including MultiMap, BiMaps, and MultiSets; how to set up and use Guava preconditions; and how to create truly immutable collections, and more. All of this is done with Java.

About Daniel Hinojosa

Providing solutions to private, education, and government entities since 1999. He has also been a teacher and speaker since the early 90s, teaching development for 8 years. His business is currently emphasized on Java, Groovy, Grails, EJB3, and the JBoss Seam web framework. Daniel Hinojosa is also co-founder of the Albuquerque Java User's Group and is currently failing overcoming his addiction of NFJS conferences.

Venkat discussing transformations

January 10th, 2012 -- HTTP and Groovy AST Transformations

Start 2012 on the right foot by learning about HTTP and Groovy AST transformations at the January meeting of the Boulder Java Users Group.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponshorship of the room. Big Sky Technology run the ÜberConf and No Fluff, No Stuff conferences.

We are also thankful for TekSystems's sponsorship's of the pizza and drinks.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00: Parlez-Vous HTTP?

HTTP is a omnipresent, critical and misunderstood protocol. Parlez-Vous HTTP will cover:

• What is HTTP
• A brief history of HTTP
• Where does it fit in the stack?
• The HTTP request/response cycle
• The anatomy of a HTTP message
• Tools used to trace and debug HTTP

About Frederic Jean

Frederic is the Principal Software Engineer at Snugg Home LLC. The bulk of his career revolved around using HTTP to do anything from sending static files, dynamic websites and Solaris patch metadata to clients; to receiving live, streaming video on an iPad application; to building services used to help improve home's efficiency and reduce it's owner's energy bills.

7:00-7:30: Food, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Food and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Groovy AST Transformations

The ability to navigate and even alter the abstract syntax tree of your code is very powerful and yet under utilized. Quite a few tools have exploited this capability in Groovy. These techniques can be useful to create fluent syntax and validate DSLs. In this presentation we will explore the key features and strengths of Groovy AST transformation API and techniques.

About Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is the founder of Agile Developer, Inc. and an adjunct faculty at University of Houston. Venkat helps his clients to adopt agile practices and prudent technologies. He has trained and mentored thousands of developers around the world and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences. Venkat is the author of ".NET Gotchas," co-author of award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy," and "Programming Scala." His latest book is "Programming Concurrency on the JVM—Mastering Synchronization, STM, and Actors (Pragmatic Bookshelf)"

December 13th -- Functional Java, Java and Play! on the Cloud

We take a look at writing functional Java code and running Java and Play! on the Cloud in this month's meeting.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponshorship of the room. Big Sky Technology run the ÜberConf and No Fluff, No Stuff conferences.

We are also thankful for TekSystems's sponsorship's of the pizza and drinks.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00: Functional Programming in Java

Functional programming is in the air. The most common question in java programmers mind is whether it is useful and possible to do functional programming(FP) in Java ? I will start of with a quote from Timothy Budd, “Research results from the psychology of programming indicate that expertise in programming is far more strongly related to the number of different programming styles understood by individual than it is the number of years of experience in programming.”

So FP will help you to become a better Java developer. And the good news is FP is language agnostic. Its a style that you learn and use in almost all programming languages.

Outline of the presentation * Introduction to FP with examples written in Java * Why FP is important to learn and explain the benefits of FP in enterprise software development * Overview of the FP libraries available in Java (functionaljava, lambdaj etc)

About Nilanjan Raychaudhuri

I am Nilanjan Raychaudhuri working as technical lead for Livingsocial. Previously worked as a senior developer with ThoughtWorks Inc. (www.thoughtWorks.com). I have managed and developed software solutions for more than 12 years and specializing in integrated multi-tiered web and server applications. I believe in high-discipline agile methodologies, customer focus, simple tools applied elegantly, and continuous improvement. I have a passion for the elimination of duplication in design, code, data, and most of all – effort.

I write software for a living. But since I enjoy creating things and solving problems, I also write software on my pastime. I am currently working on scala-webmachine (restful resource framework). In past I worked on other open source projects like Panopticode, scala-inline and autotest4j. When I am not working on projects I play with functional programming.

Currently writing a book on Scala programming language called “Scala in Action” from Manning publication and speak at various conferences.

7:00-7:30: Food, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Food and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Java and Play! on the Cloud

Heroku is a Polyglot Cloud Application Platform that makes it easy to deploy Java & Play! apps on the cloud. Deployment is as simple as doing a "git push". This session will teach you how to deploy and scale Java & Play! apps on Heroku.

About James Ward

James Ward is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku. Today he focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. You can find him tweeting as @_JamesWard, answering questions on StackOverflow.com and posting code at github.com/jamesward.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam Presenting

November 8th -- Tail Call Optimization, Memoization and Concurrency

This month, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam will explore recursion and concurrency techniques that can simplify modern Java and JVM applications.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponshorship of the room. Big Sky Technology run the ÜberConf and No Fluff, No Stuff conferences.

We are also thankful for TekSystems's sponsorship's of the pizza and drinks.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00: Tail Call Optimization and Memoization Techniques in Modern JVM Languages

Recursion is a highly expressive technique that's common in divide and conquer strategy and also in dynamic programming. Modern JVM languages like Clojure, Scala, and Groovy offer techniques to optimize recursion and also to facilitate dynamic programming. In this presentation we'll take a look at the nature of the problems that can use these techniques, and dive into code examples to use these techniques.

7:00-7:30: Food, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Food and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Concurrency Without Pain in Pure Java

Abstract: Programming concurrency has turned into a herculean task. I call the traditional approach as the synchronized and suffer model. Fortunately, there are other approaches to concurrency and you can reach out to those directly from your Java code. In this presentation we will discuss the actor based concurrency and also the software transaction memory. We will then develop examples using AKKA and compare the power of these approaches in contrast to the traditional approach.

About Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is the founder of Agile Developer, Inc. and an adjunct faculty at University of Houston. Venkat helps his clients to adopt agile practices and prudent technologies. He has trained and mentored thousands of developers around the world and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences. Venkat is the author of ".NET Gotchas," co-author of award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy," and "Programming Scala." His latest book is "Programming Concurrency on the JVM—Mastering Synchronization, STM, and Actors (Pragmatic Bookshelf)"

Matthew on Cascading and Hadoop

Matthew McCullough starting his talk on game theory

October 11th -- Game Theory, Software Development and Cascading Through Big Data

This month, Matthew McCullough with give us a look at software development through the lenses of game theory and at handling big data with Cascading.

Sponsorship and Door Prize

We continue to enjoy Big Sky Technology's sponshorship of the room. Big Sky Technology run the ÜberConf and No Fluff, No Stuff conferences. We will raffle a pass for this November's Rocky Mountain Symposium conference.

We are also thankful for TekSystems's sponsorship's of the pizza and drinks.

JetBrains's and ZeroTurnaround's are providing personal licenses to their products.

Location

We continue to meet at the Wolf Law Library:

Wolf Law Building, Room #207
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Boulder, CO 80309

A map and directions can be found on the Boulder JUG web site.

6:00-7:00: Game Theory and Software Development

The full title of this talk reveals its grand aims: Game Theory and Software Development: Explaining Brinksmanship, Irrationality, and Other Selfish Sins

Once in a while, a topic, seemingly orthogonal to software development, presents a great opportunity to showcase how engineering can benefit from knowledge of seemingly more social disciplines. In this talk, the fundamental principles of economics' Game Theory are compared to often inexplicable behaviors and decisions we frequently observe in programming projects.

Then, with a good Game Theory vocabulary under your belt, several standard games are studied in a manner that will allow you to better manipulate the inputs. These games are present in web framework choices, project planning and estimation, and even team decisions on which bug to solve first. With a good understanding of Game Theory, you'll be able to understand and influence what you previously labeled 'irrational behavior.' It turns out to be far from irrational when examined in the context of self-preservation. Once these behaviors are understood, you will be able to ethically influence the outcomes to your personal and corporate advantage.

7:00-7:30: Food, Soda and Networking

We are grateful to Tek-Systems for their continued sponsorship of the Food and Soda!

7:30-9:00: Cascading through Hadoop: A DSL for Simpler MapReduce

Hadoop is a MapReduce framework that has literally sprung into the vernacular of "big data" developers everywhere. But coding to the raw Hadoop APIs can be a real chore. Data analysts can express what they want in more English-like vocabularies, but it seems the Hadoop APIs require us to be the translator to a less comprehensible functional and data-centric DSL.

The Cascading framework gives developers a convenient higher level abstraction for querying and scheduling complex jobs on a Hadoop cluster. Programmers can think more holistically about the questions being asked of the data and the flow that such data will take without concern for the minutia.

We'll explore how to set up, code to, and leverage the Cascading API on top of a Hadoop sample or production cluster for a more effective way to code MapReduce applications all while being able to think in a more natural (less than fully MapReduce) way.

During this presentation, we'll also explore Cascading's Clojure-based derivative, Cascalog, and how functional programming paradigms and language syntax are emerging as the next important step in big-data thinking and processing.

About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a trainer for GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Maven, Leiningen, Gradle), distributed version control (Git), Continuous Integration (Hudson) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

David Geary Discussing Game Development with HTLM5

Adam Esterline on Selenium Testing