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...

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.

Folks: The 2008 Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) will be held April 25-27, 2008 at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ. The TCF IT Professional Conference (now in its 3rd year) will be held on Friday, April 25, 2008 from 9:00am - 5:00pm. The regular TCF activities (now in its 33rd year) will be held on Saturday and Sunday, April 26-27, 2008. Activities include: (a) Suite of talks (b) Indoor vendors (c) Outdoor flea market (d) Robotics competition (NEW) (e) Saturday night banquest (at additional cost) The festival is always in need of volunteers. The commitment is a minimum of four (4) hours of your time. For your efforts, you will receive: (a) A TCF hat (b) Free admission to the weekend show (c) A discounted on the banquet ticket Please visit http://www.tcf-nj.org/ for more details including forms for volunteering. There's something for everyone at TCF! Please contact me if you have any questions, and I hope to see y'all at the show!

The 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (sponsored by Chariot Solutions) will be held on March 26-27, 2008 at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. Registration is still open and seats are going fast. For more detailed information, please visit the following URLs: http://www.chariotsolutions.com/ http://www.phillyemergingtech.com/

For those of you that haven't heard of the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) symposium tour, my first question is, " Where have you been?! " This tour has been around since 2001, and has been gaining popularity. This is the third year that the tour has made its way through New Jersey, and I recently attended the Atlantic Northeast Software Symposium that was held in Princeton, New Jersey on August 10-12, 2007. This was my second consecutive year attending NFJS and I have to tell you that, just like last year, I left the symposium having learned a tremendous amount. When Jay Zimmerman, the founder and director of NFJS, says he strives to stay on the cutting edge of technology, he means it! For example, at the New York Software Symposium that I attended last year in Newark, New Jersey, I primarily gained a much better understanding of Spring , Hibernate , and Aspect-Oriented Programming . This year, I gained a much better understanding of Groovy , Grails , the Google Web ...

Last Call...Make sure and join us if you can for a great show! The No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Series 2007, the premier technically focused Java/Agility Event series is coming to Princeton with the Atlantic Northeast Software Symposium 2007 on August 10-12th. Event Name: Atlantic Northeast Software Symposium 2007 Dates: August 10-12, 2007 Location: Princeton - Westin Princeton URL: www.nofluffjuststuff.com/sh/2007-08-princeton The 2007 Atlantic Northeast Software Symposium is coming to Princeton on August 10-12th. ANSS 2007 will offer five (5) concurrent sessions for you to choose from. The hot topics covered at ANSS 2007 include: * Spring 2.0 * Groovy/Grails * OSGI * Domain Driven Design * Annotations * JavaScript * DROOLS * Java 6.0 * REST * JRuby *Agility *Performance & Scalability We have a great set of speakers lined up for you to enjoy featuring: Venkat Subramaniam, co-author of "Practices of an Agile Developer" David Geary, co-author of "Core JSF...

This month, we welcome Aaron Mulder from Chariot Solutions who will introduces us to the open source Apache Geronimo application server from the perspective of a J2EE developer. Do you have experience developing J2EE applications, but no idea how to get started with Geronimo? Or perhaps wonder how to compare Geronimo to JBoss or Tomcat? Aaron will cover the Geronimo server's features, installation and management, deployment plan syntax, included tools, debugging options, and more. He'll also look at the logs, the management console, setting up database pools and JMS resources and security realms, how to hook Geronimo up to your build scripts and IDE for deployment and debugging, and how to take advantage of Geronimo plugins to leverage additional features from scheduling and reporting to J2EE 5. Aaron Mulder is the Chief Technical Officer of Chariot Solutions where he helps companies with their Java, J2EE, and Open Source architecture challenges. When not consulting,...

The 2006 No Fluff, Just Stuff (NFJS) Symposium Tour made it's way through the New York area on August 18-20, 2006 at the Four Points at Sheraton Hotel in Newark, New Jersey. This symposium series has been touring the country every year since 2002, but I first learned about it when Barry Burd attended his first symposium in 2005 to interview some of the industry experts while honing his Java skills. His interviews, by the way, can be found on Java Boutique . Barry, a regular attendee at the ACGNJ Java Users Group , raved about his experience at the symposium. When I first learned that this year's tour would come through Newark, I knew that I had to attend. Before I even had a chance to talk to my boss about attending, I happened to win a full registration pass at one of Yakov Fain's Princeton Java Users Group meetings. Yakov raffled off a total of two (2) such passes at his June and July meetings. My experience was better than I had expected. Jay Zimmerman does an ou...

Welcome to Mike's Java Cafe! Come on in, relax, and have a cup of Java so that we can discuss Java, the programming language. I've been facilitating the ACGNJ Java Users Group in Scotch Plains, New Jersey since February 2001. We meet on the second Tuesday of the month at the Scotch Plains Rescue Squad. Meetings are open to the public, so if you happen to live in the greater New York area, and have a chance to visit, please stop by to say, "hello." I look forward to discussing Java with you, and hope to meet you at a future Java Users Group meeting. Enjoy!