Mike's Java Café

The 38th Annual Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) will be held one month from today, i.e., Saturday, March 16, 2013 from 9:00am - 5:00pm. The venue will be at The College of New Jersey . This will be year #2 in which TCF has gone from a Saturday/Sunday event to only one weekend day, Saturday.  This was due to ever-increasing costs relative to the income realized from running such a show.  As you may know, computer shows have seen a decline in attendance over the past 20-or-so years. However, what makes this show different from others is the suite of talks that are available for a modest $10.00 price-of-admission.  I always say there's something for everyone at TCF as the talks aren't just for tech-savvy or IT professionals.  This year, there are tracks on Microsoft, Robotics, Apple, Games, among others.  I will be conducting a series of talks in my own track, Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) University .  Look for a separate blog post for details! The keynote speaker at T

The topic for this month's meeting will be Technical Overview of Meteor . Meteor is an ultra-simple environment for building modern websites. What once took weeks, even with the best tools, now takes hours with Meteor . The web was originally designed to work in the same way that mainframes worked in the 1970s. The application server rendered a screen and sent it over the network to a dumb terminal. Whenever the user did anything, that server re-rendered a whole new screen. This model served the Web well for over a decade. It gave rise to LAMP , Rails , Django , PHP . But the best teams, with the biggest budgets and the longest schedules, now build applications in JavaScript that run on the client. These apps have stellar interfaces. They don't reload pages. They are reactive: changes from any client immediately appear on everyone's screen. They've built them the hard way. Meteor makes it an order of magnitude simpler, and a lot more fun. You can build a compl

The 2013 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (sponsored by Chariot Solutions ) will be held on April 2-3, 2013 at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Early bird registration is currently at $385.00 until February 15 when the price increases to $460.00 . Sheraton Society Hill Hotel  One Dock Street (2nd & Walnut) Philadelphia, PA 19106 (215) 238-6000 Book your room through starwoodmeetings.com to receive a discounted rate.

After a an extremely long hiatus of more than four years, I will be resuming blogging on this and potentially other out-dated blogs that I have started. Look for announcements on ACGNJ Java Users Group meeting announements, upcoming conferences and feedback about those conferences. I hope you find resurrection of this blog useful and I would appreciate any feedback you may have. Happy blogging! Mike.