After many brain-storm sessions and different cross-cutting ideas,we finally have reached a consensus about the new JavaPolis logo.

Last year we reached about 950 attendees of which 94% were Belgians. This year we really want to get a lot more international attendees from all over Europe. This is why you can see in the JavaPolis logo the Dutch windmills, the French eifeltower, Englands Big-Ben, the German Brandenburger and the Belgian Atomium

Through an international marketing campain and bannering on different well respected Java sites like JavaLobby and The Server Side hopefully attrack more international attendees. Starting from June we'll start mailing a JavaPolis newsletter of the confirmed speakers, topics and other related news. This will hopefully create the awarness we're looking for.

Personally I want JavaPolis to become the Apache of the European Conferences, low-entry fee and good content
Let's be honoust, JavaPolis is really value for money and we hand pick our speakers to garantee the best content and presentations. Don't worry, if not selected as a JavaPolis speaker you can always fill-in a BOF, based on a first-come-first-served algorithm. Just go to the wiki page and enter your BOF topic page.

Hopefully JavaPolis attendees will also get more involved on the wiki's we've setup for both BeJUG and JavaPolis. Through this collaborative site attendees can add content, pictures, blogs and even comments.

Let the games begin....

Stephan

This evening I've upgraded Confluence from 1.0.3a to version 1.1.

Unfortunetly I had to re-import all of the pages from the previous version thus removing the original authors and posted blogs.
However with this upgrade we've some bug fixes and new wiki features

Finally we can now write our own cross-platform Java screen savers using the early access SaverBeans Screensaver SDK.

They've included a BlackGlass screensaver (see picture below) which rotates a number of beans around a central axis. Looks really nice and works very fast...

Maybe we should write a BeJUG or JavaPolis screensaver

Robin and I have been playing around this weekend with audio capturing and streaming.

We'd like to capture the audio from the [next BeJUG workshop] where we've some great speakers lined-up. The problem with audio recording was always that we had to change the tapes every 60 or 90 minutes. Now I've hooked up my Sony Digital handycam to my external Pioneer HD/DVD-Recorder which gives us 30 hours of video & audio recording without any tapes... YES

Afterwards we can very easily divide the video (and audio) recording and write it to a "normal" video DVD.

Now Robin kicks-in, by "ripping" the audio from our DVD into Adobe premiere and sync'ing the imported powerpoint slides with the audio. The output is an MPG file that we can place on our BeJUG site and share with other Java addicts... finally

Please let us know if this is really something you're waiting for ?!

I am new! Wanted to taste confluence and see how things go here. And I should admitt, it is impressing.

AOP Workshop

I think the workshop was disappointing...

It started good, but then we got into tiny details of the Spring framework.
It was basically a show off between AspectJ and Spring.

What about standards ? Shouldn't it better be part of the java spec ? If not,
everyone will use their own flavour (javax.aop ??).
What about jdk1.5 and AOP ?

What is the impact in production:
*performance ? are there real sample cases/benchmarks ?
*debug when errors: postprocessed bytecode: how to link with original code,... ?

Keith Lea has performed a benchmark between G plus plus (GCC) 3.3.1 20030930 (with glibc 2.3.2-98) for the C plus plus, with the -O2 flag (for both i386 and i686). He compiled the Java code normally with the Sun Java 1.4.2_01 compiler, and ran it with the Sun 1.4.2_01 JVM. He ran the tests on Red Hat Linux 9 / Fedora Test1 with the 2.4.20-20.9 kernel on a T30 laptop. The laptop "has a Pentium 4 mobile chip, 512MB of memory, a sort of slow disk," he notes.

More info @ http://kano.net/javabench/

I really enjoyed the AOP workshop because it's rather new to me, I saw my first AOP presentation (Ron Bodkin) at Server Side Symposium in Las Vegas this year, and as a result of that I was eager to learn.

The evening before the workshop we (the BeJUG steering members) met with Adrian and Rod for dinner. After a good meal and some beers we started, what else would you expect, talking about AOP and Spring. During these conversations I already received many answers to the burning questions lined-up in my head. I couldn't wait using it.... and because of that (or was it because of the number of beers?) I only fell asleep around 3 o'clock.

I had to be early at the venue because I needed to setup (and test) the hardware for the video and audio capturing. It seemed that Eva, Arjan and later Jo are also early-birds.

Rod and Adrian decided to do a joined AOP introduction which went very well.

Afterwards Rod continued on the Spring AOP features and I personally think (at that time I didn't know of course) it would have been better if Adrian first finished his complete presentation.

For the people interested, there is a brewery in Bruges called "De Halve Maan" which releases betwen May and June an old family season beer called Spring. Luckily for Rod I knew this and was able to give him a one liter bottle, cheers

Adrian really gave me a good view of how 'cross-cutting concerns' can be identify from an AOP angle and create the right modularity we've always tried to achieve using OOP.

AOP creates reusable OOP

I truly believe by introducing AOP in your OO application, we can finally keep the essence (=business logic) in our application code.

I always wondered how I could enforce design rules, like if I've done for the JJGuidelines OOP rules using CheckStyle and PMD which are based on AST. It's clear after the MVC / AOP example from Adrian that I could probably use AOP for this. GREAT!

Wim was the last AOP speaker. What I found interesting was the comparison between the different AOP players and the surprise that different Belgium Universities are strongly involved in the whole AOP movement!!

Before Adrian and Rod flew back to the UK, we captured the two interviews.

Afterwards I was able to burn the complete workshop on one DVD...Robin it's all yours now...

Today, in a discussion on M$ vs Java, I got the obvious question "How many Java developers are there currently in Belgium?".
I was ashamed that, even being part of BeJUG steering, I had to admid I had no idea at all.

Do you have any information on this? Is there any info source that could help me answering this?
An old article tells me Sun wants to raise the number of java developers from 3 to 10 million world-wide. What is the current status on this?

I could make an estimate based on the total number of BeJUG members and the estimate percentage of the java community that we reach in Belgium. But how do I determine the latter? In my company we are 35 developers of which 4 are BeJUG members. So, does BeJUG reach 10% of the community?

I know some companies doing java development (j2se, j2ee, j2me, jsp, ...) having only 1 BeJUG member, or even no BeJUG members at all . So does BeJUG reach 5% or 2% of the community?

YOU can help me in making my estimate of the total nr of java developers in Belgium more correct!!
Please write down, in comment to this Blog, the total number of java developers in your company, and the number of BeJUG members among them! If you know other companies with java developers, try to estimate their ratio too - and list it in your comment (you can ommit company names if you want too – I don't want to use this feedback for BeJUG marketing).

Or, ultimately, if you know an information source that can give me the correct numbers, send me the URL

The first day of JavaOne 2004 has not finished yet but like every year the main focus areas are already clear.

Continuing from last year the theme Ease Of Development for J2EE is clearly evolved in some drastic changes to specs like EJB 3.0 and JDBC 4.0. Annotations is the @keyword.

There is clearly a comeback of the client side of the Java Platform, both in J2SE and J2EE, I just struggled to get through a line of thousands of people to get into the JSF session of Craigh MacLanahan. Even on the J2ME side some changes are made to enhance user experience.

A new concept since this year is the seperation of keynotes in between vendors Every major sponsor has their own keynote session, unlike previous years when all vendors' presentations were blended in the general keynote. This sometimes lead to interesting verbal fights between competitors.
Obviously Sun takes the larger part of the sessions and this permits them to also show more products, like the newly available Java Studio Creator, which was announced to be free.... if you take a 99$ subscription.

The sessions are kept quite technical - as far as I have witnessed already- a continuity from last year, code samples are provided and products are kept out.

The Pavilion with vendors is similar in size as last year, which suffered big time on the economic recession. Not many people are on the showfloor during the sessions which is a good sign for the quality of the sessions or maybe to do with the limited number of vendors handing out t-shirts.

Day 2 of JavaOne kicked off with the traditional keynote of Scott McNeally.

There was a special section on JUGs, he mentioned there are about 550 JUGs in the world.
Some magazine ( I need to find out which one ) actually created a worldmap with all JUGs.

Scott mentioned 4 JUGs, one of which was BeJUG !!! ( he actually called us BeBeJUG )

If you get the chance to see the keynote on the site, you will hear 2 guys cheering when he mentioned
BeJUG. Just be reassured it is just Stephan and me.

It looks like several Tigers are out there to eat you!

The J2SE-version-5-Tiger will be released around the Q4 of this year with many new features like annotations, generics, auto-boxing, varargs, for-each, enums, static imports, simplified threading, etc. There's a beta2 available today. However it looks like the J2SE 1.5 books are still being printed...

The other Tiger I'm (also) really looking forward to, is the next Mac OS X version following Panther. Yesterday Steve Jobs gave a great keynote during the Apple WWDC2004 conference which also takes place this week in San Francisco. Next to the over 150 new features, Tiger (which will get released around Q2 2005) will also support our own Java Tiger.

If Apple can combine the (highly speculated) G5 PowerBooks with the Tiger release I'm more than happy to throw my Dell out of the Window
While I'm planning to switch my hardware, I should probably also think to switch my wheels. At the JavaOne exhibition hall you can see a BMW 645i sports scar which has an embedded wide LCD screen, by Siemens VOD, completely written in Java. Next to that you can now also iPOD enable your BMW (or Mini) for a couple of hundred Euros... unfortunately only the models from 2002 onwards can get iPod enabled.... damn.
Maybe I should switch my "mobile" hardware sooner ?!

Java is really everywhere!

Stephan