Mike's Java Café

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 Novembe...

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: Plati...

 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...

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...

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...

The ACGNJ Java Users Group had an excellent year in 2018 surpassing our 2017 accomplishments. We held our usual 11 meetings (summer break in August) and hosted seven (7) well-known Java industry leaders: January 9 - Jason Young presented "Introduction to Java 9." March 19 - Venkat Subramaniam presented "Twelve Ways to Make Your Code Suck Less." April 10 - Ben Evans presented "Gambling with Leopards." May 8 - Chandra Guntur presented "Garbage Collection - The Journey Until Java 11" October 9 - Jeanne Boyarsky presented "Java 11 - Keeping the Java Release Train on the Right Track." November 13 - Reza Rahman presented "What is CQRS+Event Sourcing and Why Java Developers Should Care." December 17 - Chandra Guntur , Donald Raab , Barry and I participated in a Java open-source panel where we shared our own contributions to open-source projects. We also had a remote presentation by Scott Stoll and Nash Ramdial on Fl...

The October 2018 ACGNJ Java Users Group meeting featured guest speaker, Jeanne Boyarsky . She presented Java 11 - Keeping the Java Release Train on Track . Jeanne discussed the recent changes in the Java programming language including the delay of the module system (ultimately released in Java 9), the new six-month release cadence and which versions will have long-term support, debunking the myth of having to pay for Java, the pros and cons of the new var keyword (released in Java 10), and garbage collection. Jeanne is an experienced conference speaker especially CodeOne (formerly JavaOne), the author of several books, certified in Spring, Jenkins, OCAJP/OCPJP among others, and a distinguished Toastmaster.

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...