I've mentioned it a couple of times in passing a couple of times, but never called it out.

For the past several months, JetBrains has been a sponsor of the St. Louis Java Users Group. They have been giving away one(1) IntelliJ IDEA 6 license to a lucky member of the audience every month. They also give one to the presenter.

That doesn't sound to much. After all, Microsoft has been known to give away XBoxes at C#/.NET meetings. But if you think about it. the St. Louis JUG is regularly attended by 20-40 people, some of them already have an IDEA license. We've had people declining the offer because they already have one at least twice. (I have to decline the offer last month when I presented on JavaFX, because I already bought an IDEA 6 license.)

So come to the JUG meeting this evening, when Jay Meyer (of Harpoon Technologies Inc.) will talk about tools and techniques that developers can use write a secure application from scratch, or test an already-installed application.

The line-up the the next few months also look interesting:

September 13, 2007	Apache Maven - Eric Redmond (Sonatype)
October 11, 2007	Concurrency With Mandelbrot - Alex Miller
November 8, 2007	Javelin Stamp - Andrew Prunicki (OCI)
December 13, 2007	Scala - Tim Dalton

(Via Tim Bray)

Widening the JVM Languages Group: We Need You!

Charles Nutter: We need diversity in the JVM Languages group, and it's been brought to my attention that some popular/key/interesting languages may not have representation. So we need to change that.

If you are interested in the future of non-Java languages on the JVM, you should be on this list. Yes, we talk about a lot of JVM lanuage implementation challenges, we discuss compilers and stack frames and call-site optimizations, but we also talk about features peripheral to language implementation like package indexing and retrofitting Java 5+ code. We need your help.

Once you've joined, or if you're already member, you have a second task

I respectfully request that each of you search out one individual you think would be interested in the list and try to get them involved. Toss them a quick email, invite them to describe their project or language or implementation to us, and promise them they're joining a very interesting and entertaining community. History will thank you, and so will I.

I joined the JVM Language Group project when Charles announced it the first time around 74 days ago. Although language design and implementation is not my specialty, watching others discuss it is still a lot of fun.

One thing I noticed, for a long time now, is Charles's healthy respect for the other JVM languages, especially Jython, which has been around for more than ten years now. That is so unlike the other Ruby guys that I encounter online.

The goal of the group is to come up with something, some sort of a library or <shudder>framework</shudder>, that would aid the implementation of JVM languages, as well as a forum for other discussions.

I think you want to join even if you are not a language guy. After all, JRuby, (or Jython, or Groovy, or whatever), is just a big Java program.