2005 Meetings 

Jan 2005: Robert Zeigler gave a teaser NIO intro, and Rick Hightower delighted the group with musing on Spring, AOP, and IoC while Drew taunted him. It was interesting and amusing at the same time. We later went out and drank beer.

Feb 8-2005: Duffy Gillman - various open source projects for data sharing and portal activity among higher education institutions.

The University presents a large enterprise setting supporting a dazzling array of activities, all of which require the support of computing power. Many institutions have found commercial software lacking an ability to support their goals and visions. Thus the past few years have seen a rapid growth of well-funded Open Source Java projects including: uPortal, the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI), the Sakai Project, and Kuali.
In addition to the software itself, this phenomena introduces a robust model for supporting the vitality and direction of Open Source.
uPortal - http://www.uportal.org/
OKI - http://www.okiproject.org/
OSPI - http://www.theospi.org/
Sakai - http://www.sakaiproject.org/
Kuali - http://www.kualiproject.org/

Mar 8-2005: Former Sun guy and JCP chair Rob Gingell (now employed by Cassat.com) -  presented, "Java Programs Meet Scale-Out Commodity Architectures"

The industry trends of componentized applications (largely Java), rapid cost reduction of commodity systems, networking, and "utility computing" are amplifying and driving each other. In the pursuit of lower acquisition costs and apparent simplicities, many are deploying "scale-out" architectures either as replacements for old "scale-up" architectures or for new applications. In exchange, they are often eating much greater managerial complexity and costs. Cassatt Collage is a product designed to mitigate these costs and amplify the benefits of these trends.

Apr 2005: Java NIO, Robert Zeigler & Java2D, Ray Ramos

http://javanio.info/ -- interesting site, supports the O'Reilly Java NIO book by Ron Hitchens, with examples.

Java2D: An example: an ecommerce website may have thousands of product images. They would like on-sale, out-of-stock and special order product images to be enhanced, or decorated, so the products are visually easier to distinguish. Ray will present solutions that use Java2D.

May 2005: TR Rudkin - Java procedures inside Oracle

Jun 14-2005: Warner wrote an application using Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.com/) which is a new Web application framework written using the Ruby Object-Oriented scripting language. This framework and language are both relatively new and dynamic. Rails promotes heavy use of testing and even creates your test framework for you.

2004 Meetings

Dec 2004: No meeting. Gentle Ben's bar for beer!

Nov 2004: Macromedia Flex - Tim Colson

Oct 2004: Maven - Warner Onstine

Sep  2004:  SWT by Dennis Sosnoski, and Tapestry by Robert Zeigler.

Aug 2004:  Tim Colson gave a mini-tour of Confluence & FatCow. Warner Onstine introduced Spring.

July 2004 : Warner Onstine introduced Mono (Open source C# compiler/VM) and MonoDevelop. Andrew Lenards presented C# with comparison to Java 1.4/1.5.

May 2004 : Dennis Sosnoski demo'd JIBX and other web service topics.

Apr 2004: Ivis Technologies and Michael Oliver were both unavailable at the last minute, so Warner did an impromptu preso on Maven and Tim talked a little bit about FatCow/Confluence from Atlassian.

Mar 2004: Rob Gingell, chair of the Java Community Process (JCP), discussed recent news. Drew Davidson presented OGNL, his Java-based expression and binding language.