Laurie Tolson on Czech JUG

Czech Java User Group - first meeting

One would assume, that if there is a Technical University that teaches 1300 students Java language in their first class AND huge community of Java developers, including the ones that work in Sun Microsystems Czech on NetBeans and other Java applications, there would be very active Java User Group. Well, you need to have a catalyst, you need to have people that know other people so they can create a social network. Malcolm Gladwell in his The Tipping Point book calls them Connectors.
Fortunately, Roman (also called Roumen) is a person of that kind. He called first Czech Java User Group meeting and organized the presentations, including live video stream, which was done by AV Centrum Silicon Hill.
I expected almost formal meeting, since there was Mr. Havlicek, Dean of Czech Technical University, Ing. Rudolf Pecinovsky, author of several books about Java and Object Oriented Design, Pavel Suk (hey, that's me!) and Laurie Tolson, Vice president for Java and Developer Products and Platform at Sun Microsystems. It turned to be very pleasant evening hour.

Laurie talked about open sourcing Java SE, pretty hot topic in these days. It will be interesting to see future directions there. Is there going to be a strong governance model, where only few developers, that proved their knowledge and ability to make changes without breaking the code, will be allowed to contribute?  How the community can help with testing the Java SE? Can someone clone the code and sell his own version? How to keep the compatibility? Or reliability?
Yeah, having experience with NetBeans, I can imagine the fun that the team will have with resolving all these issues before everything goes open.

Roman then talked about future JUG meetings and that's where it's going to be more interesting for techies:

• September, 26th: Jason Van Zyl and Milos Kleint will be presenting  Maven
• October: Annotations in Java, presented by developers from JetBrains. The second presentation will be also about new feature in Java SE 5 -  Generics, presented by Tomas Zalusky.
  
• November: Bruno Bossola from JUG Milano will talk about Open source tools for testing Enterprise applications
• December: Roman Pichlik, Systinet - Spring 2.0, Martin Krajci Systinet - Java Persistence API

More information is on  czjug.dev.java.net (in English)  or java.cz (in Czech).

Posted at 03:07PM Sep 14, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  |