I’ve finally published my review of the EXCELLENT book by Jared Richardson and Matthew Bass at DZone. Check it out here: http://books.dzone.com/reviews/career-20-take-control-your.

For several years now, Neal Gafter (Microsoft) and Joshua Block (Google), have made a habit of presenting various incarnations of this technical session, focused on what they call “Java Puzzlers.” Java Puzzlers are nothing more than short Java programs with curious behavior. It is a somewhat interactive session, with each puzzler’s code listing followed by [...]

On Wednesday morning, JUG-USA was fortunate enough to get about 45 minutes with the “Father of Java” himself, James Gosling. Each year at JavaOne, Sun distributes registration discount codes to interested JUG’s. The JUG with the most registrations using their code gets this meeting. JUG-USA’s founding allowed us to use a bit of strength [...]

I happened to catch Guillaume LaForge’s tweet this morning about a “Groovy lunch” at JavaOne today. After our JUG-USA meeting with James Gosling(blog entry on this one to come), I made my way over to the “cafeteria” and found Guillaume, James Williams (of the Griffon team), and John Smart in exactly the location that Guillaume [...]

The JavaOne 2009 Script Bowl was quite a delight to watch. The players were Jython (Frank Wierzbecki), Groovy (Guillaume LaForge), Clojure (Rich Hickey), Scala (Dick Wall), and JRuby (Thomas Enebo). The event was divided into two rounds:

Demonstrating Language Features
Demonstrating Community Contributions

Each of the players focused on different angles during the language feature round. The Jython [...]

Here’s the link to my slides from my podcast Wednesday morning from the Java.net Community Corner: Download PDF.

The morning session opened with a HUGE elephant under the rug - “Where is Oracle?” There’s no booth in the Pavilion - super strange.
Things kicked off very slowly. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO, for all of his ponytail excellence, wasn’t exactly inspiring a great deal of excitement in the crowd. In fact, the loudest applause from [...]

My second lightning talk at Community One West 2009 revolved around the still relatively recent announcement that Java is now supported on Google’s App Engine.
What exactly is Google App Engine? It’s none other than a way that you can run your Java™ technology-based applications on Google’s massive infrastructure.
As far as the “Geekxecutive Summary,” Google has [...]

I gave two lightning talks at CommunityOne today, the first of which described deploying Grails applications to Morph AppSpace.
For the uninitiated, Grails is a Ruby on Rails inspired full stack web development framework which brings “convention over configuration” and “DRY” into the Java web development arena. Unlike Rails, it is not an effort from scratch, [...]

So far one of the greatest things about JavaOne for me has been the opportunity to connect face-to-face with so many people that I’ve only communicated with digitally. I’ve also been able to catch up with folks that I’ve run into through other conferences, the JUG, and work:

Finally met Aaron Houston and Mark DeHart from [...]