SeaJUG is an all volunteer effort - which means items such as the website and mailing list are updated as schedules afford. You can usually count on our meetings occurring on the 3rd Tuesday of every month, and always count on them being open to all who are interested, but the next meeting agenda may not appear until the week of the presentation.

We need suggestions/volunteers for topics! If you'd like to donate your time/skills to the cause, contact Nimret Sandhu.

Meeting Location:
Amdocs
2211 Elliott Avenue
Suite 400
Seattle, WA 98121 Map

Meeting Time:
6:45pm Networking
7:00pm Presentation

Upcoming User Conferences

16 Feb 2010 : CSI: Seattle Java Edition

Most Java software problems come from the little “broken windows” – a null pointer here or there. Sometimes, however, you find yourself in a nasty section of town, with the heap, stack, and permgen brutally fighting for memory. Threads in nasty knife fights over resources. Sometimes just plain freaky things – how did I wind up with 1.5GB of HashSet allocations?

In this edition of CSI: Seattle Java Edition, we’ll look at the tools available to combat these nasty foes and even see some of them in action – we will blow up a lot of application servers and JVMs in the process, with graphic results. We’ll keep it fun and interactive, and give out a few prizes for whoever can figure out the nasty stuff.

Speaker Bio
Will Iverson has been writing computer software since he was a wee kid. Since then, he has worked for Apple, Symantec, SolutionsIQ, and Slalom, as well as running his own consulting company. He has written four books on software development, as well as several articles and speaking at dozens of conferences. He currently works for All Star Directories as Development Manager and Enterprise Architect.

19 Jan 2010 : Clojure

JVM based languages are the New Black. Jython and JRuby, pnuts, groovy and scala all vie for our collective attention. Perhaps you'd like to make room for another? Clojure is Rich Hickey's relatively new addition to the group. As a lisp variant it brings a functional programming approach, "code as data", macros and introduces a set of concurrency primitives that hold out the promise of finally making it easy for mere mortals to manage shared state in our applications.

Intrigued? If so, you should probably read about it at http://clojure.org and view Rich Hickey's videos at http://clojure.blip.tv. If you can't manage that, you can settle for listening to me (Stan Dyck) talk about and demonstrate some of the features of clojure at the next SeaJUG meeting. I will introduce the language syntax and design, talk about clojure IDE support, the clojure approach to functional programming, and show a bunch of demonstrations stolen from all over the Internet for your viewing enjoyment.

The Video for this presentation is available online at:
http://vimeo.com/8916104

Dec : No Meeting!

We don't have a meeting scheduled for December. Please stay warm and enjoy the holidays. We will meet on Jan 19th for our next talk. Cheers!

17 Nov 2009 : NetKernel

NetKernel is a software platform that combines the power of Unix, the flexibility of the Web and the portability of Java. Based on a REST micro-kernel, NetKernel supports a computing abstraction in which all resources (code, information, services) are identified by URIs.

NetKernel has a ten-year heritage of research and product development that originated in HP Labs. Since 2002, 1060 Research has released NetKernel 2, 3 and recently version 4. NetKernel is used by large corporations, US intelligence agencies, consulting companies and software product companies to implement a wide range of application and system architectures.

This presentation introduces NetKernel, its computing abstraction and the architectural implications. Demonstrations will include an embedded instance of NetKernel and the full NetKernel Standard Edition platform running a production application.

Speaker Bio:
Randy Kahle holds a BA from Rice University in EE and Math Science and an MBA from Dartmouth. He has worked at GTE Sylvania, HP, Microsoft, MageLang Institute, Variantia and 1060 Research.

20 Oct 2009 : Protecting Java Code - Going Beyond Simple Obfuscation

While Java offers an efficient framework for developing and deploying enterprise and Web 2.0 server or client-side applications, it also presents many risks. Perhaps chief among those risks with Java, being an interpreted language, is that its bytecode contains highly detailed metadata making compiled applications easy to reverse engineer, tamper and pirate. In our discussion we will consider and demonstrate some of the vulnerabilities and risks along with protection tools to pack when assessing or implementing Java application security.

Speaker Bio
Bryon Gloden is a Security Architect with Arxan Technologies, Inc and spends much of his time helping customers implement software protection solutions. His past experience includes contribution in a variety of functional areas: Technical Pre-Sales, Support, Rapid Prototyping, Security Forensics, and Threat Modeling. Previously, Mr. Gloden performed application security research and development throughout all stages of the application security lifecycle (Requirements, Risk Assessment, Protection Design, Implementation, and Verification). Mr. Gloden holds a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Purdue University, with emphasis in Information Assurance and Security.

They are also providing food and drinks. There will also be a gift card raffle. The video should be up by this weekend.

The Video for this presentation is available online at:
http://vimeo.com/7280314

15 Sept : NO MEETING!

unfortunately I haven't been able to put together a speaker for our meeting. I was hoping to give a presentation on OSGI but it's been a little busy at work here so that will have to wait till later.

We do have a speaker for Oct and I will try to put together a mini-presentation format as we discussed on the mailing list for Nov. We also have a tentative speaker for Jan.

In the meantime if you're itching to talk about something, pls let me know so I can schedule it. Nothing like a good presentation to put down on your resume ( with a link to the video) to demonstrate your tech-fu chops =)

18 Aug 2009 : Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine

Cloud this, cloud that. It's all we are hearing about these days. And whether buzz-worthy or not, you need to get in-the-know so that you can talk effectively about how this could fit into the application strategy on your next project. Leverage 100s of hours of research distilled into a 90 minute presentation. Get bootstrapped with what cloud computing is and isn't, who the players are in this space, what unique features each offers, and then how Google is completely changing the game.

We'll navigate through a some demos of building and deploying an app live to the Google App Engine, and talk about the excellent tooling that the framework provides. Lastly, we'll put a reality check on cloud computing, and GAE specifically, looking at pitfalls and gotchas. You'll walk away having a thorough knowledge of cloud computing basics and the ability to build a practice app for GAE.

About Matthew McCullough:
Matthew McCullough is an energetic 12 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy.

Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O'Reilly, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group.

His experience includes successful J2EE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, financial management, and telecommunications firms, and several published open source libraries.

Matthew jumps at opportunities to evangelize and educate teams on the benefits of open source. His current focuses are Cloud Computing, Maven, iPhone, Distributed Version Control, and OSS Tools.

Matthew resides in Denver with his beautiful wife and baby daughter, who all are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado offers.

21 July 2009 : Practical Maven

As described by the project website, "Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information."

This presentation will show how to use Maven 2 to build both JAR and WAR projects, and show how the dependency management system can save considerable time and energy. We will start with a "from the ground up" conceptual overview, and cover real world usage (as well as discuss what kind of projects Maven is NOT suitable for use). The presentation will include a demonstration of Maven 2, integrated with the latest version of Eclipse as well as a discussion of the use of both Hudson and Artifactory, a Maven 2 repository management system. The session will include lessons from the speaker's open source projects as well as the year-long complete rebuild of a commercial external website involving three concurrent Scrum teams.

Maven cynics, real world users, and complete novices are all welcome! ;)

~Speaker Bio~
Will Iverson has been writing computer software since he was a wee kid. Since then, he has worked for Apple, Symantec, SolutionsIQ, and Slalom, as well as running his own consulting company. He has written four books on software development, as well as several articles and speaking at dozens of conferences. He currently works for All Star Directories as Development Manager and Enterprise Architect.

FYI: here is an introductory article on Maven written by the author several years ago:
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/03/01/building-web-applications-with-maven-2.html

The Video for this presentation is available online at:
http://www.vimeo.com/5784431

and the presentation materials are online at:
http://www.cascadetg.com/maven/

16 June 2009 : Monads

In this talk Greg Meredith will look at the monad "design pattern" and how it applies to programming on the web. Programming examples will largely be drawn from functional JVM languages such as Scala.

~Speaker Bio~

Greg Meredith has supported his math habit by working in computing. Currently he sits at SAP as principal architect. He was the principal architect of Microsoft's BizTalk's Process Orchestration offering and took on the burden of contributing to the early WSDL spec to keep it from being more of a train wreck than it is. He also worked on Microsoft's super secret BigTop project, working on an OS and Programming Language pair, based on process calculi. Prior to that he was one of the core members of the Carnot Team at the first industrial research consortium, the now defunked MCC.

There he worked with Christine Tomlinson on Rosette/ESS, a fully reflective actor-based programming language with a high performance execution engine.

Note the video for this presentation is available at:
http://www.vimeo.com/5318303

19 May 2009 : Writing Quality Software

Being non-physical, software quality is very different than quality in physical goods. In today's environment software must not only provide value now, it must be easy to change so it can continue to deliver value in the future. This is especially true on agile projects where short iterations and ongoing customer involvement means software needs to change frequently. Without paying attention a few key qualities the agile process of iterative development can soon degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. In this seminar we will explore specific qualities that make software more maintainable and easier to change.

~Speaker Bio~
David Bernstein has been writing software for over a quarter of a century. A noted speaker and presenter, David has been responsible for successfully delivering systems that drive leading econometric and financial firms as well as helping to develop application and operating system software. He has nearly two decades of experience "preaching what he practices" and has personally trained over 6,000 developers on how to improve the design and construction of software. In addition to his deep technical knowledge and passion for software development, David has experience running all aspects of a startup software company and is also an award-winning video producer. Read David's blog Techniques of Design: http://www.techniquesofdesign.com

Note that a video of this presentation is available at:
http://www.vimeo.com/4759140