A quick update on the JavaPolis DVDs.

All JavaPolis DVD orders (until yesterday) have been shipped. In total we've almost delivered 300 DVDs including one free DVD for every JavaPolis 2004 speaker and our partners.

Java User Groups get a 25% discount (when ordering more than 10 sets) on the JavaPolis DVD, making it 29,- Euro a set. For example, next month the JUG in the Netherlands (NLJUG) will make the JavaPolis DVD available for its members during the J-Spring seminar.
So feel free to contact us if you want to offer the JP DVDs to your JUG members.

The JavaPolis DVD has already been used by some companies as a customer gift and incentive for employees, other people have use it to setup a Java(Polis) eLearning site on the companies extranet... all good stuff

Cheers,

-Stephan

Due to some technical problems with our Merchant, we've migrated the JavaPolis DVD purchase process to paypal.com. This relieves me and Bart from the operational hasle of restarting the server every so often etc.
Anybody can now order the JavaPolis DVD dual jewel-box for 39 Euro's (including shipping) anywhere in the world with your paypal account. Ok, if you don't have one you'll have to create it but it's worth the effort
We might even consider reusing this mechanism for the JavaPolis 2005 registration payments and BeJUG membership fees.

It goes almost without saying that the already succesfully received DVD purchases will get processed as normal.

People who do not have a credit-card or paypal account can send an email to info@bejug.org to purchase the DVD through a regular Purchase Order.

-Stephan

Just a quick update on the JavaPolis streams:

Next to the 1.400 attendees and the 170 (until today) ordered JavaPolis DVDs.
We've delivered (in cooperation with JavaLobby) 31.590 JavaPolis stream views from day one until today.
This brings us to a total of 33.160 JavaPolis presentation views ... WAUUUWWW this is pure Rock & Roll

Let's do even better with JavaPolis 2005 !

Stephan

During the last couple of days we've already received over 100 purchases of the JavaPolis DVD.

Java developers from Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, USA, Russia, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa and other have already ordered their own JavaPolis dual DVD box.

We've also received an order of 10 copies from a very special JavaPolis partner

The actual DVD boxes will get shipped this week, if you can't wait you can see a picture of the box below:

I do have to apologize for a few problems within the DVD purchase process, which have/are been resolved in record time by Bart Strubbe... thanks Bart!

I was wondering if any other conference has ever made all presentations available through a DVD box? The DVDs are hopefully an alternative for people who are less fortunate to attend conferences in Europe and/or US, even if the JP entrance fee was only 200 Euro!

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the DVD and learn from the JavaPolis presentations as much as we've!

Spread the (Java) word.

Stephan Janssen

Hi,

We're finalizing (thanks to Bart Strubbe) the DVD registration process, which will be active (after some testing) around next week.

The actual DVDs will be ready for shipment beginning of April (another 2 weeks). The JavaPolis DVD dual-box will be yours for 29 Euro (+ VAT), non-European countries will pay an additional 10 Euro for shipment. The registration wizard will ONLY accept credit card purchases, a PDF invoice will be sent to you automatically through email!

Before we bring the DVD registration online, we'll migrate confluence from Tomcat to Resin (which will give us a better performance and disolve the client disconnection exceptions ). Next month we'll then upgrade to Confluence version 1.4 which elimates the right wiki column, giving us more room to place content.

Cheers,
Stephan

• Date: March 22nd 2005
• Location: Atrium Seminars, Hof ter Vleestdreef, 1070 Brussel
• Price: Free for BeJUG members and JavaPolis attendees, 200 Euro for non-members.
• Registration: Send email to events@bejug.org?subject=Rich User Interface Seminar 2005

Most of us are used to work with Java on the server side and ignored or neglected Java at the client side. A lot happened in the last few years to make development for the client side in Java more appealing and to make the user interfaces more attractive.

The XUL frameworks play an important role to make the developer's and graphical designer's life a lot easier. XUL, which stands for XML User interface Language, was brought to everybody's attention in the late nineties when it was introduced with the Mozilla browser. Since then a lot of Java implementations of XML-based User interface Languages appeared, of which JellySwing, Thinlet, XUI and SwingML are the best known. To make life even easiers, some of the above frameworks even allow you to define the style in a seperate file, just as CSS does for HTML. There is only one bad thing about these frameworks, they are not interoperable, there is no universal accepted standard for XUL as there is for HTML or XHTML for example. You can not reuse the XML you wrote for one of the frameworks with another framework, they all define their own XML User interface Language.

The most heard complaint about client side applications in Java is that they are so ugly. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about Swing! The only problem is that it takes a lot of effort to make a good look and feel for Java applications. To make life easier, on javatoo.com you can find look and feels that you can easily incorporate in your own applications. Applications build with the look and feel of JGoodies or Skin Look And Feel look a lot better than when you use the standard look and feel!

Another approach is to build rich internet applications by taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people have the Flash plugin installed in their browser and that SWF can be dynamically generated on the server side by tools like OpenLaszlo or by using Flex. Both make use of XML based User interface Language, but here the XML is generated or written on the server side and compiled and send to the client to be executed by the Flash plugin in the browser.

Last but not least, there are new efforts like JDIC, which can be used to access native compontents (access to the browser, the tray, etc...) from within Java applications, and JDNC, which provides richer components, a higher level API and a XML User interface Language. These can greatly simplify development of Java desktop clients.

In this workshop, we will try to show the latest innovations in the above areas.

Day two of TSSJS was for me mainly a Spring and Oracle experience.

Floyd started the day by mentioning that the approach of inviting the same speakers who contribute to J2EE is "by Design". After a few more polls: 65% is not using or plan to use AOP, only 20% can introduce freely open-source API's, other have a committee to review this, it was time to Spring. (al wie da nie springt, al wie da nie springt, is ...) Rod Johnson dominates the symposium with 4 sessions!!

During lunch Ted Farrell from Oracle gave a fun keynote on "Does J2EE matter ?" with some nice demo's of EJB3 (an early draft implementation can already be downloaded from Oracle) and JSF. I wonder when Oracle will also make the switch to Eclipse ?

When JavaPolis 2005 takes place (by the way that's December 12th till 16th) migrating to EJB3 will be The Hot Topic! Hopefully by then every application server will support it... This is why I attended Mike's Keith talk to see if he could do a similar talk "How to migrate to EJB3" at JavaPolis, which he will Maybe we should again invite Gavin King for a talk on "Migrating Hibernate3 to EJB3", I'll check out his talk today and ask him if it makes sense and if he's interested.

Frank Cohen was sitting next to me during lunch, I knew him of the BEA Technical Director emails and told me he spends a lot of time with Java Communities around the Bay area. We exchanged cards so we could keep in touch on speakers, topics and other related Java stuff that might be of interested for both SIGs.

During that keynote, Floyd pointed out to me that they're using a "monitor" to count the number of minutes the speaker still has available. The application starts blinking when the time is over and I was just waiting to see if it would explode if the speaker exceeds his limit Great idea for JavaPolis. Floyd told me that during next years Symposium, he'll release a DVD of all the talks on it. This is great, the inspiration works both ways, now he stills needs to reduce his entry fee to 300 dollars

Peter Zadrozny said hello while I was in the process of gluing MyFaces with Spring, he confirmed that Oracle Corp. will again support our conference initiative, Great !! That reminds me, I need to get hold of the MacroMedia guys here in the US...

The last session I followed was a BOF from John Rizzo on JavaBlackBelt. I really like the initiative and idea but I was a bit disappointed that during the presentation Null Pointer Exceptions were still thrown Murphy was definitely present because he also turned of the lights for a few seconds.

So today I want to see Dain Sundstrom from Geronimo, Cameron Purdy, Gavin King and Jason Hunter in action and then it's back to Belgium...

The people of TSSJS used a device from OptionFinder to allow people to give real-time answers for different questions presented during the keynote sessions. This did give some nice insights on what people use to develop J2EE, what they do or don't like etc. Talking about this with Floyd, it struck me that in Europe we could easily do the same using SMS! Everybody has a phone and knows how to send an SMS (if you don't ask your children or any teenager out there).

We could have a keynote talk just to do the polls and find out in more detail what the JavaPolians do or don't, prefer etc.

From a technical point of view we just need to setup an SMS-server that can handle the messages, process it and give the results in real-time.
Setting this up could be a nice additional stress factor to introduce

Is there anybody out there who would be interested in helping us setting this up ?
Experience you (or your company) wants to share to set this up ?
Any company out there interested to drive this ?
If so, just post a comment or mail me...

Cheers,
Stephan

So next week I'm flying over to Las Vegas to attend (for the 2nd time) The Server Side Symposium.
I'm looking forward to meet different speakers and mingle with other attendees and hopefully learn a few new Java things.
Hopefully Floyd will have a Java wall, so I can draw JavaPolis in big letters on every December month

Another mission to attend TSSS is, of course, to invite some people to speak at this year JavaPolis 2005.

I'll meet with Ted Neward who is actually the first invited speaker (already since December 2004) for JavaPolis 2005.
He's written a book on Effective Enterprise Java (where did he get his inspiration from for his book cover?) that will be an interesting talk.
Ted is also involved in the ServerSide.net and because of that he can really make a nice comparison between J2EE and .NET.
During last years TSSS he moderated a talk on J2EE and .NET and Jo Wyns and I were nicely surprised how well he knew both architectures and APIs.

Other people I want to meet are Jason Hunter (XQuery) and Jason Carreira (XWork) and John Crupi all of them have still yet to speak at JavaPolis

I'm also interested to see how far Geronimo is with their J2EE implementation; Dain Sundstrom is the man to follow.

Anybody else going from Belgium ?
If not, let me know whom I should invite

Stephan

Hi,

Just to inform you that JavaPolis 2004 sponsors (including JCS ) can send (once a year) a blind email (whatever the content) to the JavaPolis and BeJUG database. This service is part of the sponsoring agreement.

However, if you whish, you can disable these partner emails by adjusting your wiki profile (see right-hand corner).

Cheers,

Stephan

Hi,

Just to let you know that today we've exceeded 4.000 JavaPolis wiki users,
who are enjoying all of the JavaPolis 2004 presentation streams and slides

Stephan

Hi,

JavaLobby has released the Eclipse in Action presentation of last years JavaPolis.
You can view the presentation of Erich Gamma here.

Unfortunately JavaLobby has decided to resize the presentations so it would fit their layout, which makes Erichs demos a bit small to read.

Until JavaLobby has found a solution for this "cosmetic" problem, you can (with the current setup) view the presentation directly through the following url.

Please visit our [JavaPolis Media] (only for signed-up wiki users) page if you want to see the full list of available JavaPolis presentations.

We're working hard on the JavaPolis DVDs, which will hold EVERY JavaPolis presentation !!

Enjoy,
Stephan

Today was like another day until I got the Javalobby newsletter of today in my mailbox.
Rick Ross telling us that we have started to fuel the Possible Biggest Java Conference Ever?
It actually took some time before I finally waked up and have realized that, yes, the videos of Javapolis were on-line.
Will the world be really different now?
Hum, for me yes, finally, I will stop reworking, watching and encoding videos at night and during the week-ends. I will stop doing Flash development and move back to Java. I think that Stefan will agree with me that we need some rest (at least for a week or two)...
Maybe the impact for the Java community is more interesting. Would not you expect now the same level of service from other Java conferences for the same price? Definitely!

Many thanks to Rick, Matt for believing that we would be able to do it and having supported us in that unreasonable adventure
We are shaking the Java community and that is cool!

You will find Javapolis videos here

Robin

As of today, registered JavaPolis wiki users can test run three JavaPolis presentations; Hibernate in Action, Pragmatic Groovy and the Java Puzzlers !!
Login to our wiki and go to our JavaPolis Media overview page where you can find the related links.

Below you can find a small screen shot of how each presentation page looks like.
On each presentation page you can post related comments and/or questions and you can also rate and download the talk!

We'll also move and update our JavaPolis Speaker Gallery, so JavaPolians can use this flash app to kick-start a presentation.

Keep in mind that this is still a beta test where JavaLobby is monitoring the load and continues to configure the current setup (Thanks JavaLobby !)
More presentations will follow in the very near future, so stay tuned and make sure that you've turned-on your daily email wiki. (See wiki profile)

Enjoy,
Stephan
PS: The JavaPolis DVD will be ready around the end of february!