Mike's Java Café

The May 2018 ACGNJ Java Users Group meeting featured guest speaker, Guntur Chandra , director at BNY Mellon , organizer/presenter at the NYJavaSIG , and co-chair of the NYJavaSIG Hands-On Workshop. He presented " Garbage Collection - The Journey until Java 11 ." Chandra provided a comprehensive overview of garbage collection (GC) in the Java programming language including various patterns and algorithms, logging, and performance. He also provided a sneak peek into what's on the horizon for GCs in Java 11. You can find Chandra's presentation here .

This month's Java Users Group meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 8, 2018 at the Drew University starting at 6:30pm. Chandra Guntur will present " Garbage Collection - The Journey Until Java 11 ." Abstract: Chandra will provide an overview of basic Garbage Collection patterns and enhancements in Java. His presentation will cover various JVM options and flags to tune GC as well as new logging techniques with Java Unified Logging. Bio: Chandra is a Java geek, Spring Boot and cloud enthusiast, organizer and presenter at the NYJavaSIG , and co-chair of the NYJavaSIG Hands-On-Workshop (HOW). He loves coding in Smalltalk and is getting to love Java over the past 20+ years. Where: Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, Room 106 Drew University 36 Madison Avenue Madison, New Jersey 07940 When: Tuesday, May 8, 2018 6:30-8:30pm

The April 2018 ACGNJ Java Users Group meeting featured guest speaker, Ben Evans , a Java Champion, co-founder of jClarity , and author of several books. He presented " Gambling with Leopards ." Ben provided an overview of a distributed sports book, known as BetLeopard , and the kinds of bets that are processed. He then demonstrated several ways to implement BetLeopard: Java 8 lambdas Hazelcast IMDG and Apache Spark   Hazelcast IMDG and Hazelcast Jet   Source code for BetLeopard can be found on Ben's GitHub page.

The Eclipse Foundation recently launched at survey for developers to choose the new Jakarta EE logo.  There are seven finalists and you get to choose your top three. Time is running out as the survey closes on Friday, April 6 at 12 noon EDT . Eclipse also announced a brand new Twitter account, @JakartaEE . These are indeed very exciting times in the Java world!

The ACGNJ Java Users Group (facilitated by yours truly ) and the NYJavaSIG (facilitated by Frank Greco ) recently hosted Venkat Subramaniam to speak at our respective groups on back-to-back nights. On March 19, 2018, Venkat visited the ACGNJ Java Users Group at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey where he presented " Twelve Way to Make Code Suck Less ." He discussed why we should care about code quality and defined the First Law of Programming which states, "Lowering quality lengthens development time." Venkat then introduced and discussed his 12 principles to improving code quality along with plenty of live-coded examples. On March 20,  2018, Venkat visited the NYJavaSIG at Credit Suisse in New York City where he presented " From Functional to Reactive Programming ." He discussed the differences between imperative vs. declarative styles, normal functions vs. higher-order functions, and functional to reactive programming along with plenty...

The 43rd annual Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) will be held on Saturday, March 17, 2018 at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, New Jersey. The theme for this year's event is Wearable Technologies. Dr. Nick van Terheyden , a leader in Digital Healthcare and Innovation and former Chief Medical Officer for Dell, will deliver the keynote address.  He provides strategic insights and guidance to support healthcare organizations, medical professionals and patients through information-enabled healthcare.  Dr. Nick brings an incremental approach to developing successful strategies and applies his expertise to achieve a technology environment that is interconnected, efficient and patient-focused.  He is a highly sought out speaker on the practical and futuristic use of healthcare technology and how it can improve patient engagement and wellness. As always, there will be a suite of talks throughout the day including tracks on wearable technologies, software applicat...

I am happy to announce that my request to join the Java EE Guardians was recently accepted! I first learned about the Java EE Guardians almost two years ago while writing my InfoQ news piece about Oracle's sudden slowdown in the development of Java EE 8 and the response by the Java community. It was during that time the Java EE Guardians were born. Reza Rahman , former Oracle evangelist and now senior architect at CapTech Consulting, led the creation of the Java EE Guardians. I was impressed with their charter and have followed along with their activities ever since. I am honored to be part of a membership that includes notable members such as the father of Java, James Gosling, along with JUG leaders, JCP experts, spec leads, bloggers, authors, and speakers. All you need is a passion for Java EE, now Jakarta EE , and be active in the community. If you have such a passion for Jakarta EE and interested in membership, please send an e-mail to their Google Group .

As you may already know, the Java EE name is in the process of a name change. Oracle forced a rebranding after open sourcing and transferring Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation last fall. The Java EE Guardians , led by well-known Java evangelist Reza Rahman , submitted an open letter to Oracle to express their concerns over Oracle's restriction of the name "Java" and the "javax" package names. Rahman conducted two surveys on the rebranding last fall and the results overwhelmingly demonstrated that the Java community supported to keep the Java EE name. Despite all the efforts by Rahman and the Java EE Guardians to keep the "Java" and "javax" names, the process of determining a new name for Java EE will move forward. A new poll to select Java EE's new name recently opened. There are two choices: Jakarta EE Enterprise Profile Once used by the Apache Foundation for stewarding various Java subprojects, the Jakarta name was ret...

The ACGNJ Java Users Group had a banner year in 2017.  We held our usual 11 meetings (summer break in August) and hosted five (5) well-known Java experts: April 11 - Elliotte Rusty Harold presented "Exceptions: I'm Telling You for the Last Time." May 9 - Victor Grazi presented "Reactive Programming by Example." May 30 - Viktor Gamov presented "The Splendors and Miseries of Distributed Streams." October 10 - Reza Rahman presented "Java EE 8 and Java EE 9: What You Need to Know." December 12 - Donald Raab presented "API Deep Dive: Designing Eclipse Collections." This is indeed a first for our quirky little JUG to host this many Java experts in one year.  The rest of the year featured presentations by our regular "cast of characters:" January 10 - "Technical Overview of Speedment" presented by myself . February 27 - "Getting Started with JavaFX" presented by Scot Jenkins. March 28 - ...

I am happy to announce that Donald Raab will visit the ACGNJ Java Users Group on December 12, 2017.  He will present, " API Deep Dive: Designing Eclipse Collections " at the Scotch Plains Rescue Squad (second floor) starting at 7:30pm. When designing an API, its authors have to consider many aspects: style, naming, scope, and implementation details are among these aspects. They have a direct impact on the resulting code, and its implementation can go in many different directions. How do you choose the best route to go? How do you guarantee consistency and performance across the framework? In this session, the mastermind behind Eclipse Collections (and previously GS Collections) shares the design choices he had to face and how he did it, the impact on different implementation strategies, and how the framework became a Eclipse project. Come take a look behind the curtains of a widely used API that has many years of development and that you can c...

The October 2017 ACGNJ Java Users Group meeting featured guest speaker, Reza Rahman . He presented " Java EE 8 and Java EE 9: What You Need to Know ." He outlined the past, present, and future of Java EE, reviewed notable JSRs within Java EE 8, and what's on the horizon. Rahman also discussed the stagnation of Java EE , the emergence of the Java EE Guardians , and the events that lead to where Java EE is today. You can read all the details including Q&A with Rahman on my InfoQ news piece,  Eclipse Foundation Prepares to Open Source Java EE as EE4J .

This month's Java Users Group meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 12, 2017 at the Scotch Plains Rescue Squad starting at 7:30pm. Barry Burd will present " Swift Programming for Java Developers ." Abstract: Swift is Apple's new language for developing macOS and iOS applications. In this talk, Barry will introduce Swift programming and compare features of Swift with their counterparts in Java. He will also demonstrate the creation of a simple app for Apple's iPhone. Where: Scotch Plains Rescue Squad 1916 Bartle Avenue Scotch Plains, New Jersey 07076 When: Tuesday, September 12, 2017 7:30pm As always, you can visit the Java Users Group website for the latest information. Please contact me if you have any questions and I hope to see y'all on September 12!

I am happy to announce that Reza Rahman will visit the ACGNJ Java Users Group on October 10, 2017.  He will present, " Java EE 8 and Java EE 9 - What You Need to Know " at the Scotch Plains Rescue Squad (second floor) starting at 7:30pm. The process of defining the scope for Java EE 8 was the most community opinion driven in the history of the platform.   Java EE 8 is supposed to solidly enable HTTP/2, Server-Sent Events (SSE), JSON and aligning all parts of the platform with Java SE 8.  It includes a much awaited security API overhaul, a brand new MVC API as well as a slew of critical updates to APIs like JSF, JMS, JPA, JAX-RS and CDI.  Unfortunately the road to Java EE 8 has not been smooth.  After a long and silent delay Oracle announced updated plans for Java EE 8 and Java EE 9.  The plans now include adding support for dynamic configuration, health-checks, NoSQL, fat-jars, eventual consistency, multi-tenancy, dynamic discovery...

The 12th annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (ETE) Conference was held on Tuesday, April 18 and Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at the Society Hill Sheraton in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. I was honored to have served as a steering committee member for ETE 2017 and to have covered the conference as a dedicated reporter for InfoQ . The summaries for both days are listed as follows: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference 2017: Day One Recap Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference 2017: Day Two Recap Additional news items from ETE 2017 are listed as follows: Kiki Carter, Enterprise Architect at Lightbend, Speaks to InfoQ at ETE Jake Wharton, Android Engineer at Square, Speaks to InfoQ at ETE Oracle Defends the Java Module System   As always, the folks at Chariot Solutions went above-and-beyond organizing and hosting this conference!

The April ACGNJ Java Users Group meeting featured guest speaker, Elliotte Rusty Harold .  His presentation was entitled, " Exceptions: I'm Telling You for the Last Time ." Elliotte discussed the three rules of using exceptions: Rule #1 - try blocks should be long, not short Rule #2: Checked exceptions indicate environmental problems. Runtime, i.e., unchecked exceptions indicate program errors. Rule #3 - If you can't handle it, bubble it. Harold provided his reasoning for not using exceptions.  He stated, "If we haven't learned how to use exceptions within the last 20 years, will we learn over the next 20 years?  Maybe exceptions are just too hard.  And if exceptions are too hard, then what about Java features such as lambdas and data binding?" Sun forgot to document exceptions when they were first introduced in Java 1, alpha 3.  Elliotte encouraged everyone to search for the original white papers by James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, and Bi...

I am happy to announce that Elliotte Rusty Harold will visit this month's ACGNJ Java Users Group to present, " Exceptions: I'm Telling You for the Last Time " on Tuesday, April 11, 2017 at the Scotch Plains Rescue Squad (second floor) starting at 7:30pm. No feature of the Java programming language is as original or as misused and controversial as exception handling. More than twenty years after Java was introduced more developers don't understand exceptions than do. That's not surprising given that most textbooks and tutorials get exceptions seriously wrong by focusing on the rules you must follow rather than the reasons you should follow them. And yet just three rules cover 99% of what you need to know about exceptions: Separate exception handling from the main path by making try blocks as long as possible. Use checked exceptions for environmental problems and runtime exceptions for programming errors. Bubble exceptions you can't handle. Follow...

The 12th annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (ETE) Conference will be held on Tuesday, April 18 and Wednesday, April 19 at the Society Hill Sheraton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The two keynote addresses will feature: Blair McIntyre - The Web as Platform for Augmented Reality Experiences Scott Hanselman - A History of Back-End to Front-End: From Mainframes to Compiled JavaScript and Beyond Other notable speakers include: Jessica Kerr Yehuda Katz David Nolen Jake Wharton Maciej Ceglowski Andy Hunt Holden Karau Alex Grigoryan Guillermo Rauch Daniel Spiewak The entire schedule can be found here . ETE that is organized by Chariot Solutions in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.  I have participated in this conference since 2008 as an attendee, a speaker, and more recently, a member of the ETE Steering Committee.  Chariot Solutions is the most gracious hosts as they provide breakfast, lunch, and an after-hours social event after day one. This...

The 42nd annual Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) was held on Friday, March 17 (TCF IT Professional Conference) and Saturday, March 18 (regular show). At the TCF IT Professional Conference , I presented " Building Realtime Data Apps with Speedment ."  Many thanks to Per-Åke Minborg , CTO of Speedment, for his support. My schedule allowed me to attend only the morning sessions of the conference.  I attended the following talks before and after mine. Andrew Murran, Senior Cyber Security Engineer with Sila Solutions Group presented "Rebooting Software Development."  He focused on the philosophies of why developers choose the path of least resistance to ultimately write poor, therefore less secure code.  Andrew also demonstrated that it is possible to change that path of least resistance to write good, quality code that is more secure. Howard Deiner, a software consultant and educator who specializes in Agile process and prac...

The 42nd annual Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) will be held on Saturday, March 18, 2017 at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, New Jersey. The theme for this year's event is Autonomous Vehicles. Ragunathan "Raj” Rajkumar , Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), will deliver the keynote address.  Professor Rajkumar directs a number of labs at CMU, including the the newly established University Transportation Center on Technologies for safe and efficient transportation.  He was co-director of the lab that created the Autonomous Cadillac, which completed 33 miles through high-traffic thoroughfares and two interstate highways. As always, there will be a suite of talks throughout the day including tracks on autonomous vehicles and object-oriented programming.  Please check back here for an updated blog post as the speaker grid is confirmed. Tickets are $12.00 in advance on-line and $15.00 at the do...

The topic for this month's meeting is "Technical Overview of Functional Programming" presented by Barry Burd . Abstract: This presentation is an overview of the concepts typically used in functional programming.  These concepts include pure functions, immutability, referential transparency, pattern matching, lambdas, currying, sections, map, filter, fold, list comprehension, lazy evaluation, higher-order functions, polymorphism, and monads.  Some of these concepts are the basis for features in Java 8, but many aren't. Where: Scotch Plains Rescue Squad 1916 Bartle Avenue Scotch Plains, New Jersey 07076 When: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 7:30pm As always, you can visit the Java Users Group web site for the latest information. Please contact me if you have any questions and I hope to see y'all on April 26!