Mike's Java Café

 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...

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 w...

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...

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...