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Garden State Java User Group - 2022 Year in Review

As our second full year operating as the newly-branded Garden State Java User Group came to a close, it's time to reflect on what we have accomplished in 2022. Along with providing awesome speakers and Java-related topics, our continued participation in the Java community included: Having renewed our membership in the MicroProfile Working Group as a contributing member. Having adopted the new Jakarta Data specification to complement our adoption of Jakarta NoSQL specification.  I am also happy to announce that I was elected as a committer for both of these specifications. Having joined the Jakarta EE Working Group as a guest member. Our participation in the Java in Education initiative. We will continue our participation in these initiatives in 2023. We were also fortunate to have been sponsored by these wonderful organizations: Platinum Sponsorship: JFrog Our Partner: Devnexus Silver Sponsorship: Azul Per Meeting Sponsors: JetBrains  and  Jakarta EE for JUGs November 2022 Spo

Garden State Java User Group - 2021 Year in Review

As our first full year operating as the newly-branded  Garden State Java User Group comes to a close, it's time to reflect on what we have accomplished this past year. When I introduced our group  at this time last year, I listed the directors that created our 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.  We are: Mike Redlich (that's me!) Barry Burd Chandra Guntur Paul Syers Since then, we added "leader" and "advisor" roles to our leadership team. We have three awesome leaders that assist us with behind-the-scenes operations, social media advertising and attending our weekly leadership meetings.  Please welcome: Neha Sardana Scott Selikoff Caitlin Mahoney Our advisors meet with us once per quarter to provide guidance and ensure we are on the right path in the way we operate the Java User Group.  Please welcome: Diane Liporace Ari Waller Paul Furbacher Pratik Patel Vincent Mayers We were also fortunate to have been  sponsored by these wonderful organizations: Platin

Garden State Java User Group - 2020 Year in Review

 The Garden State Java User Group has been through an interesting year.  Having started out the year as the ACGNJ Java Users Group, the new leadership team started the transition during the summer to officially kick-off the newly rebranded group on October 1, 2020.  We finalized our incorporation as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in early November. This hasn't stopped us from providing high-quality topics with well-known Java luminaries: February 13 - Mark Heckler presented "Game of Streams: How to Tame and Get the Most from your Messaging Platforms." May 14 - Dierk König presented "Purely Functional Programming on the JVM with Frege." October 5 - Josh Long presented "Bootiful Testing." November 4 - Heather VanCura presented "Java Community Participation and Collaboration in 2020." December 8 - Pratik Patel presented "Data Science on the JVM with Kotlin and Zeppelin." The rest of the year featured presentations by myself on Quarkus, M

Introducing the Garden State Java User Group

After almost 20 years of operating as the ACGNJ Java Users Group, I am happy to introduce the newly-rebranded Garden State Java User Group  (GSJUG), Inc.  This group will continue in the tradition that has been practiced since the beginning - provide high-quality Java education to the community. As the founder of the ACGNJ Java Users Group, I am happy to introduce the GSJUG leadership: Mike Redlich (that's me) - founder and named director in October 2020. Barry Burd - first joined in May 2003, named vice-chair in April 2014, co-facilitator in February 2018 and director in October 2020. Chandra Guntur - first joined in March 2018 and named director in October 2020. Paul Syers - first joined in April 2006 and named director in 2020. How did we get here? Let's quickly explore the timeline: January 2001: The ACGNJ Board of Directors approved the creation of the Java Users Group set for the second Friday of the month. February 9, 2001: The inaugural Java Users Group meeting wa

Happy 25th Birthday, Java!

This Saturday, May 23, 2020, the Java programming language will be 25 years old! Sun Microsystems introduced Java at the SunWorld Conference in San Fransisco on Tuesday, May 23, 1995. This week, Oracle kicked off the birthday festivities with a special one-hour session for Java Champions and Java User Group Leaders on Tuesday followed by a Happy Birthday, Java! session on Wednesday.  The latter featured an all-star cast of Java luminaries providing a retrospective of their Java-related memories and experiences: Chad Arimura Sharat Chander Trisha Gee Brian Goetz Aimee Lucido Mark Reinhold Georage Saab Venkat Subramaniam Oracle will be providing resources for Java Users Groups to help celebrate this milestone birthday.  For more information, make sure you visit the Our World. Moved by Java and Inside the Java Platform Group web sites. The Java community has been encouraged to share their own memories and experiences on Twitter using the hashtag, #MovedbyJava .  While

Preview - February 2020 ACGNJ Java Users Group Meeting

This month's Java Users Group meeting will be held on Thursday, February 13 at Drew University starting at 6:30pm. Mark Heckler , Spring Developer & Advocate at Pivotal, will present " Game of Streams: How to Tame and Get the Most from Your Messaging Platforms ." Abstract: Most mission-critical systems have distributed elements or are entirely distributed, resulting in a number of challenges: performance, scalability, reliability, resilience. The eight fallacies of distributed computing are alive and well! Messaging platforms are often used to solve these problems and increase the "ilities", but they don't come without a few complexities of their own. Mark will not only teach you how to use open source solutions like Spring Cloud Stream, RabbitMQ, and Apache Kafka to maximize your distributed systems' capabilities while minimizing complexity, but also how to really use them! There be dragons when dealing with messaging platforms; Mark wil

ACGNJ Java Users Group - 2019 Year in Review

The ACGNJ Java Users Group had an excellent year in 2019. We held 12 meetings (two meetings in October and the usual summer break in August) and hosted eight (8) well-known Java industry leaders: January 8 - Donald Raab presented "Invest in Your Java Katalogue." February 18 - Chandra Guntur presented "Alternates to Java Reflection and Unsafe Usage." March 12 - Gladwin Burboz presented "Understanding Facebook/Google Authentication with Spring Boot 2.x Demo (Hands-On)." April 2 -  Christian Engelbert presented "Instan(t)a-neous Monitoring." July 23 - Matt Raible presented "Mobile Development with Ionic, React Native and JHipster." October 8 - Reza Rahman presented "Java on Azure: How Microsoft Learned to Love Java." October 22 - Ray Tsang presented "Serverless Kotlin with App Engine." November 18 - Micah Silverman presented "Beautiful SDK Design in Java for APIs." The rest of the year featu

Preview - May 2019 ACGNJ Java Users Group Meeting

This month's Java Users Group meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, Drew University starting at 6:30pm. I will present " Building Microservices with Micronaut, A Full-Stack JVM-Based Framework ." Micronaut , introduced in early 2018 by Object Computing, is a full-stack JVM-based framework for creating microservices-based, cloud-native and serverless applications that may be written in Java, Groovy and Kotlin. There will be a brief introduction and overview of Micronaut followed by a live demonstration on an application written in Java, Groovy and Kotlin. We've had quite the lineup of speakers for the first four months of 2019. Here is a quick summary: Invest in Your Java Katalogue by Don Raab Alternates to Java Reflection and Unsafe Usage by Chandra Guntur Understanding Facebook/Google Authentication with Spring Boot 2.x Demo (Hands-On) by Gladwin Burboz Instan(t)a-neous Monitoring by Christoph Engel