I applied this year to the EC elections of the JCP for a seat on the Java SE board. I got 15.8% of the vote, but alas, did not win a seat. The PR release for this can be read here.
Standard / Enterprise Edition Executive Committee
Number of eligible voters: 948
Percent voting members casting votes: 26.9%
The top two members have been elected and will serve for the next three years.
Intel Corp. 46.4%
Keil, Werner 24.9%
McCullough, Matthew 15.8%
Tiwari, Shashank 12.7%
Several other attendees, namely Tim Berglund and Mike Brevoort took some excellent notes on the specific sessions they attended at No Fluff Just Stuff. If you want a recap of the sessions so you can best choose what to attend when NFJS hits your city, take a moment to read their summaries.
My attendance this weekend of the NFJS tour in Denver, CO proved once again to be as valuable as ever. With a heavy penchant for Open Source and its rapid innovation, the speakers showcased technologies that weren’t even on people’s vocabulary lists just last year. And take note, these are not just technologies for the sake of technology. The speakers such as Ken Sipe, Venkat Sumbramaniam, Stu Halloway, Neal Ford, and more served out a steady stream of reasons why each new technology is a game-changer in its given space.
A quick top 5 list of the best presentations (that I attended):
If you have an opportunity to get your employer to purchase a seat for you to attend a stop on the NFJS tour, do it. If you are self employed, then don’t even think about not going. This is one of the best ROI’s of any conference going today. As Ken Sipe said in his keynote address, you must increase your networking, you must increase your knowledge portfolio, and you must continue to constantly change and improve as we IT professionals work in literally one of the most dynamic industry verticals in the world.
A very interesting article from InformationWeek also touches on the impact of Open Source, like TerraCotta in the Enterprise. With so much Open Source presented at NFJS, one can’t help but imagine the NFJS attendees are the drivers of this migration.
A recent survey reveals the top Open Source packages of 2008. I find it not at all surprising that Firefox tops the list and very interesting that Xerces cracks the top 3.
Ambient Ideas has officially been accepted into the iPhone Developer Program, meaning we can finally deploy beta software to actual handsets and completed products to the iTunes / iPhone Application Store. Keep an eye out for our upcoming presentations at DJUG on iPhone + Java Web Services integration.
Matt Quinlan of Appcelerator visited the Denver Open Source Users Group for our October meeting and gave a great presentation on how Appcelerator is an abstraction layer from your choice of backend web service provider (Java, PHP, ruby, .Net) and also provides a tag library that gives you access to the best of Prototype, JQuery (coming soon), YUI, Scriptaculous, and more.
The best part is how easy it is to try out Appcelerator. Just load up this page and start playing. You’ll be hooked in no time and ready to download the SDK installer for your platform of choice.
JQuery is, in my opinion, the most unique JavaScript libraries in terms of being able to modify content on-the-fly. One such incredibly useful example that I’m able to apply often, is adding PDF icons and _newwindow targets to all URLs with .PDF as an extension on all pages in a site without ever touching the source of the pages themselves, but rather just on one common include page.
Well, this library just got a major injection of Redmond steroids by the announcement, by way of Dion Almaer of Google, that Microsoft will be adding it to its standard development platform. Scott Guthrie has a quick demo of IntelliSense integration with JQuery in the ASP.NET toolset.
It’s neat to see technologies such as Hibernate, ORM, and Linq or actual implementations, such a JQuery in this case, span the borders to what I consider the three development realms – Open Source, Java and Microsoft.