2010 Meeting Topics

March 1, 2011 Meeting

Rob Rusher: Delivering to multiple platforms with Adobe Open Source technologies

ActionScript can be used to build web applications that run as standalone client as well as browser applications. Adobe AIR unleashes the creativity of designers and developers by providing a consistent and flexible development environment for the delivery of applications across devices and platforms. Support for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS mobile operating system, and TVs is now available. This session will discuss and demonstrate how to use Adobe technology to build engaging front-ends that work on many platforms.

John Lowe on Programmable Logic

This presentation provides a technical overview of programable logic devices, chips whose logic building blocks and their interconnect is specified (programmed) by the user using high level languages. Amazingly, this technology is available not only to industry, but to individuals for education, research, hobby projects, and just plain geeky fun (Yes, you can build your own PDP-11 and run Unix!). We'll look at what programmable logic devices are, why & when they are used in industry, and walk though a demo to explore the "code" & tools for these magical devices.

John's bio:

John Lowe is a wonderfully engaging speaker, and is President of NAND Gate Technologies LLC, a software development and consulting company. John's area of expertise includes embedded systems and hardware/software interaction. He has been developing embedded systems for the past 16 years including robotics, analytical instrumentation, and medical monitoring applications. John has been working with Java since 1996, and has been attending Java User groups in the Denver/Boulder area for 13 years.

February 1, 2011 Meeting

This meeting was canceled due to complications stemming from wintry weather.

January 2011 Break

DOSUG took a meeting break for the January 4, 2011 date.

December 8, 2010 Holiday Party

We will be having a holiday party on Wednesday, December 8th.

This combined DJUG + DOSUG holiday party is sponsored by the friends-of-user-groups KForce and TekSystems. It is awesome that these two organizations support the local community in such a consistent and helpful manner. Please thank these two groups for their very generous contributions to our organizations.

We'll look forward to seeing you at the party!

Date: December 8th, 2010
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Wynkoop Brewing Company
1634 18th Street
Denver, CO 80202-1212

November 2th, 2010 Meeting

Tom Marrs presents: Data Interchange Formats at Work: XML and JSON

XML has been around for years, but with the advent and popularity of AJAX & JSON, is XML still relevant? On the other hand, XML is widely used and is the basis for many standards, so why change?

You've seen the ongoing debate between the XML and JSON communities, but you need to make choices in your architecture.

Regardless of your opinion, you have questions:
- Are XML and JSON mutually exclusive?
- What are the differences between XML and JSON?
- When should I use XML?
- When should I use JSON?
- How does each data format work with SOA, Web Services, and key platforms such as Java and Ruby on Rails?

This presentation will cover:
- The Bad Old Days - Non-Structured data formats
- XML
  - Why is XML needed?
  - Schema
  - Patterns
  - XML with Web Services, Java, Ruby, and JavaScript
- JSON Overview
  - Overview
  - Why is JSON needed?
  - Structure
  - JSON with Web Services, Java, Ruby, and JavaScript
  - JSONP
- The Bottom Line - When to use XML and when to use JSON

We'll walk through examples in jQuery, JAXB, XMLBeans, SOJO, Apache CXF, Ruby on Rails, REXML, Simple-XML and ActiveSupport::JSON. Attendees will learn when to use XML and JSON, and how to integrate these data formats with Web Services, SOA, and AJAX applications.

Tom's bio:

Tom Marrs, a 25 year veteran in the software industry, is the Principal Architect with Vertical Slice, where he specializes in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). He designs and implements mission-critical business applications using the latest SOA, Java/EE, Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and Open Source technologies. Tom also spends a lot of time evaluating architecture, and training and mentoring developers on his projects.

Tom is the co-author of JBoss At Work: A Practical Guide (O’Reilly, 2005), has been published in java.net, Java Developers’ Journal, and has authored and co-authored several technical training courses. Tom speaks regularly at software conferences such as No Fluff Just Stuff about Open Source, SOA, Java/EE, and Web Services, blogs on java.net and ONJava, and reviews best-selling technical books for major publishers.

An active participant in the local technical community, Tom founded the Denver Open Source User Group (DOSUG) and has served as President of the Denver Java Users Group (DJUG).

Cliff Brandon on Opening the Data Warehouse

In March 2009, Cliff simultaneously released an Open Data Warehouse Model (ODWM) and an instance of that model for project control (PCDW). This was a first time a commercial data warehouse was released using an ‘Open’ model. The ODWM and PCDW were released to solve a specific data warehouse problem and to generate revenue.

Data warehouses, as deployed today, are services masquerading as custom products. Data warehouses are better deployed as ‘open’ products with attendant services and supporting commercial products. This basic idea can potentially change the face of data warehousing and create frontier opportunities for a new set of entrepreneurs in this technology space.

October 5th, 2010 Meeting

The first one was such a success we're doing it again! DOSUG Ignite Night returns with another lineup of great talks.

The evening will be a handful of appetizer-sized Ignite 5m:00s talks (20 slides x 15 seconds each) on a variety of interesting open source topics.

If you are interested in giving one of these types of talks on this special-format evening, please email feedback@denveropensource.org and the DOSUG board will help you secure your slot in the evening's lineup.

Topics:
Eric Wendelin - JavaScript Stacktrace
Tim Berglund - The Berserker Always Dies: The Hero Culture in Software Development
Paul Rayner - I Don't Like Testing - What Faux Reggae Can Teach Us About BDD
Matthew McCullough - Hadoop: Elephant-scale data processing
Johnny Wey - Engineering with Legato
Daniel Glauser - Predicting the Future by Looking at the Past, A Brief History of Programming Languages
John Lowe - I can't believe it's not Software
Tom Flaherty - A Practical Road Map to Enterprise Architecture
Demian Neidetcher - How to Sell Your Soul (skills to be an effective manager)
Jared Winick - Cassandra: A Highly Scalable NoSQL Database
John Kelty - Easily Remembering Technical Data
Kris Nuttycombe - Scala Implicit Typeclasses
Dan Lynn - EC2 Cluster with Terracotta distributed Ehcache
Andy Ennamorato - NodeJS: you want to put your Javascript in my where?
Mark Maslyn - Introduction to Developing with Android
Derek Chen-Becker - Pattern Matching in Scala

Examples:
http://www.youtube.com/user/iGNiTe
http://ignite.oreilly.com/

References:
http://ignite.oreilly.com/faq/how-to.html (info and templates)
http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

September 7th, 2010 Meeting

Paul Rayner on Getting Started with BDD using Cucumber

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), or Acceptance Test-Driven Design (ATDD), employs the approach of specification by example. Cucumber is such an amazing ATDD tool because it’s so good at mapping stories and acceptance criteria to automated functional tests. Product Owners, developers and testers collaborate together to write acceptance criteria in natural language and unobtrusively automate tests for them.

Cucumber enables the team to collaboratively create specific examples that specify what the system should do from the user's perspective. These executable specifications function as acceptance criteria for the user stories the team is developing. Learn about how Cucumber can help you build the right product, even if you work in Java, Groovy, or C#

August 3rd, 2010 Meeting

Tim Berglund and Matthew McCullough on NoSQL solutions

Tim Berglund and Matthew McCullough will present a 30-45 minute semi-formal discussion and slides on various NoSQL solutions and why you should care about this growing category of persistence. There is an ever increasing number of options in this space and each one is tuned to a different type of storage and mode of operation. Come find out why you should be evaluating NoSQL options for your next scalable data store.

George Fairbanks on an Architecture Haiku

An Architecture Haiku is a one-page, quick-to-build, uber-terse design description. No project wants “shelfware” documentation, but many must communicate their designs. 20 years of architecture research suggests that tradeoffs, quality attribute priorities, architecture styles, and constraints are short yet valuable.

Bio:

Dr. George Fairbanks has been teaching software architecture and object-oriented design for over a decade for companies including Kinetium, Valtech, and Platinum Technology. In the Spring of 2008 he was the co-instructor for the graduate software architecture course at Carnegie Mellon University.

He holds a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by David Garlan and Bill Scherlis. His dissertation introduced design fragments, a new way to specify and assure the correct use of frameworks through static analysis. He has publications on frameworks and software architecture in selective academic conferences, including OOPSLA and ICSE.

He has written production code for telephone switches, plugins for the Eclipse IDE, and everything for his own web dot-com startup. He maintains a network of Linux servers in his spare time.

George has been a program committee member for the Working International Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA), the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), and the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA). He has been a referee for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and IEEE Software.

July Barbeque!

Saturday, July 24, 2010

No regular Microsoft-building meeting. Regular meetings will resume in August.

Saturday, July 24th is the DOSUG Barbeque Party:
Location: Plum Valley Park, Highlands Ranch
When: Saturday, July 24, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

The Denver Open Source User Group is happy to announce its 2010 Summer BBQ. We'd love to see you there for a few hours of fun and food. Families are welcome!

Bring your favorite side dish to share. DOSUG will be supplying burgers, brats, and hot dogs.

There are spacious lawns at the park and plenty of kids' play equipment. Bring your favorite lawn game or any other picnic games you'd like.

Click for Map to Plum Valley Park
Click for Park Map

Please RSVP for the BBQ here!

June 1st, 2010 Meeting

Nathan Reese on Complex Event Processing

Complex Event Processing with Esper - Turn your database upside down!

Warehousing data for mining is missing half of the solution. Learn how to mine data in real-time using Complex Event Processing. Featuring live CEP demos utilizing Esper, an open source java CEP library, this talk will literally turn your database upside down.

Slides available here
Code available here

Andy Ennamorato on PubSubHubbub

PubSubHubbub: a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Gives publishers an assistant which notifies subscribers of updated content, so subscribers don't need to keep polling the publisher.

May 4th, 2010 Meeting

Eric Wendelin on The JavaScript Stacktrace Project

The JavaScript Stacktrace project was born out of the frustration of cross-browser debugging and aims to make supporting all browsers in your web application a little less painful. This talk will show you good JavaScript code structure for extensibility and testing, practical applications, and give you insights on how open-source software starts, grows, and thrives.

John Lowe on the JVM

With the growth of languages running on the Java platform the JVM has become a central element of our computing environments. Ironically, most developers don't actually know all that much about the JVM and how it executes code. In this session we are going to look at the JVM itself and answer some general questions: What is actually in a Class File? What do the byte code instructions actually do? What is done in class file Verification? How are multiple cores supported? How do the new generation of languages take advantage of, or hindered by the JVM? These and other questions will be covered in this summary of the JVM specification.

April 6th, 2010 Meeting

It's Clojure night!

Daniel Glauser on Intro to Clojure

LISP? Isn't that 20 years old? Indeed it is, but it was a language before its time. The hardware has finally caught up with the concepts of a LISP and we've got a wonderful implementation on the JVM that can co-exist with traditional Java code. Come find out what this Clojure revolution is all about and why the JVM is inciting this plethora of languages on the JVM.

Daniel Glauser on Web development with Clojure

You've heard about Clojure, the LISP language on the JVM, but have you heard about how it can be leveraged for web development? I bet not! Local clojure expert Daniel Glauser will share his real-world experiences on how LISP is making a comeback for thread safe, performant, and scalable web apps.

March 2nd, 2010 Meeting

Tim Berglund on Decision Making in Software Teams

Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.

In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decision-making dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to return healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We'll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders can do to swim against the tide.

Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.

Randy Kahle on NetKernel

NetKernel is a software platform that runs on the JVM. It is based on a very small pure REST kernel and includes tools and services in its stack (much like Unix). Like the Web, everything in NetKernel is identified by a URI.

NetKernel started as a research project in HP Labs in 1999. Since 2002, the technology has been advanced by 1060 Research. We are releasing NetKernel 4 on 10/9/2009 and this represents a major step forward in the refinement of the abstraction and platform.

NetKernel is used by large corporations (e.g. BlueShield of California) governments (e.g. US Army, Intelligence Agencies) and small companies. All report the same - applications built on NetKernel run faster, require less code, scale with cores and in general, simplify systems.

Bio:
Randy has worked at GTE Sylvania, HP, Microsoft, MageLang Institute, lead his own consulting company and is currently working with 1060 Research. He has worked with Java from the very beginnings of the language and was an early consultant, instructor and architectural advisor to investments banks, manufacturers and service companies. Randy is currently working on NetKernel.

February 2nd, 2010 Meeting

The February 2010 meeting will be our first Lightning Talk night. The evening will be a handful of appetizer-sized Ignite 5m:00s talks (20 slides x 15 seconds each) on a variety of interesting open source topics.

If you are interested in giving one of these type of talks on this special-format evening, please email feedback@denveropensource.org and the DOSUG board will help you secure your slot in the evening's lineup.

Topics:
Mike Prasad - Performance Tuning
Tom Flaherty - Principles of Programming Languages - Past Present & Future
Tom Marrs - Landing Your Next Tech Job in 2010
Tim Berglund - Then Our Houses Build Us (Form and Content in Software Development)
Matthew McCullough - Information Alchemy through Better Presentations
Gabe Hamilton - What's new in Dojo 1.4
Garrett Foster - eCommerce Thrills and Spills!
Paul Rayner - Still No Silver Bullet? Thoughts on Design, Complexity and the Architect
Joe McTee - Agile Estimation: The story has a point, but the point is unitless.
Demian Neidetcher - Interviewing Skills
Andy Ennamorato - Complex Event Processing: Queries on Speed
Mark Maslyn - Text Mining Using JBoss Rules
Joe Shirey - The Softer Side of the Architect
Melinda Hood - The Art of Stress Reduction
Mike Brevoort - SOLR

..and more...