Weiqi Gao's Observations - jug tag

Today's St. Louis JUG Meeting Is Canceled

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:02:43 GMT

Just a note to let everyone know that we decided to cancel today's St. Louis JUG meeting due to inclement weather. We hope to reschedule the presentation in a future St. Louis JUG meeting.

James Carr: Google Collections At The JUG

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:35:51 GMT

Oh boy. It's been a month since my last post. Is this what happens to all the other bloggers who went quasi-silent? I don't think I have a good excuse. I've not been "busy," at least not more than in the past. I've not been seeing less amusing(ly stupid) Java code than before. The only one I can think of is that somehow I think the things I might want to say is not interesting to anybody anymore. I guess fifteen years is long enough for all the interesting things to be said about Java.

But that's not true. Yesterday at the St. Louis JUG, James Carr gave a pretty interesting presentation about Google Collections. I'll point you to his slides and let you get a feel of the atmosphere at the talk:

Google Collections on Prezi

I'll just mention a few things, my reactions as I was listening:

This things has been out for a long time, right? Why haven't I used it in my projects?
Is this how you write JUnit assertions now: assertThat(3, equals(3))?
Joiner is cool indeed!
These are all good things: no public constructors; static factories; MultiSet; BiMap; MultiMap
This thing really is easy to explain and learn.
The "Builder" pattern is nice. But is it really *The* GoF Builder Pattern?
What's that presentation software James is using. It's so cool.

Thanks James.

Kevin Nilson: Pushing Data To The Browser With Comet

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:40:08 GMT

Last night's presenter at the St. Louis Java Users Group is Kevin Nilson who gave a fascinating talk about Pushing Data to the Browser with Comet.

I came into the presentation not knowing what Comet is, exception what I heard on the internet. Kevin did a great job explaining what Comet is. The most valuable part of the presentation is the demonstrations Kevin did, which are fun and informative.

I'll let you read an article by Kevin himself to get the gist of what the subject matter is. I'll just show the words I wrote down during the talk:

Jetty
Pub/Sub
Bayeux
JASONp
script tag
XSS
Cometd
Long polling
Channel
Service channel
Meta channel
Server crash
Client auto-reconnect
JSON on the wire/HTTP

The background conversation at the JUG is also informative:

Is Scala for real? Kevin told us its the hottest thing at Silicon Valley. Mark and I still have some lingering doubts. Mark is focusing on something called persistent data structures. I'm more of a Luddite, fearing the years of learning that I have to go through to be proficient.
At the end of the session, when Brian went up the stage to run the Birthday Selector application to give away the goodies, Kevin Nilson mentioned the Wheel of Fortune application that Jim Weaver wrote for his JUG. Small world.
Ken Totton (of OCI, where I work) is still looking for top notch Java architects and developers. Send me an email at "weiqigao at speakeasy dot com" if you are interested. A couple of other places are also recruiting.
Brian asked a question about MigLayout. He's reading the OCI May Java News Brief on MigLayout. I gave him an meta-answer: "Just blog about how it doesn't work, and the MigLayout author will comment on your blog and show you the right answer."

Coming back to Cometd, I do have one reservation: It's another messaging protocol. This is the rare occasion when my Java duties intersect with my messaging protocol-watching duties. It reminds me something Paul says around the office: "You can always define a Pub/Sub protocol on top of a Request/Response protocol. And you can always define a Request/Response protocol on top of a Pub/Sub protocol."

That why this post will also be available under the title "Another JUG Meeting, Another Messaging Protocol". :)