JAVA METROPLEX USER GROUP OCTOBER 25, 1999 MEETING JCPENNEY PARK CENTRAL TIME:7:00-9:00pm ATTENDANCE: 60 MEETING SPONSOR The JavaMUG appreciates the support of our meeting sponsor, Delphi Consultants, LLC who provided the pizza and soft drinks to our membership. I arrived at 7:00 PM. The parking lot was full, but that was okay. I knew most of the cars were due to other meetings held there tonight. There would be no problem getting a good seat. ...Wrong! The event was packed. I didn't count, but I would estimate there were around 70 people at that meeting (maybe more). This technology and the developers behind it have a following. And it should. SOFTWARE INSTRUMENTS Stephanie Womack with Software Instruments, a local start up company, described Software Instruments in general terms (as development is still NDA). Stephanie also introduced some job possibilities for top 5% of Java programmers skilled in OO development.
BILLY'S BOOK FREE-FOR-ALL Billy Barron gave away lots of books at the beginning of the meeting. There were about 15 or 20 on a variety of Java topics. Strangely, the Windows CE book remained unclaimed. THE PROJECT The topic of the evening was Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages. The ultimate focus of the meeting was The Jakarta Project. Jakarta holds the promise of fusing various web oriented Java technologies into one free, commercial quality, open source web server. At our presenter's relentless perseverance, Sun donated the source code of key Java/web reference implementations. Tomcat is the name of the resulting product. Tomcat will combine Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages. THE PRESENTERS There can be know doubt that the presenters are the best of the best. If you had to pick just two people to present this talk, James Davidson, and Jason Hunter would be the two. (I grabbed this bio info off of the net) James Davidson James a rabble rouser that helped convince Sun that it was a "Good Thing(tm)" to support the Jakarta Project with code and engineers. During the day, he is responsible for the Servlet API. o Helped form The Jakarta Project o Wrote the Servlet API Specification o Wrote the Servlet API Reference Implementation Jason Hunter Jason works as the Chief Technology Officer of K&A Software, where he specializes in Java training and consulting. He is author of Java Servlet Programming and publisher of the Web site Servlets.com. THE PRESENTATION James presented a PowerPoint based slide show, setting the tone of the meeting in the first slide (eat, breathe, drink, learn, live, play Java Technology). James covered the basics of Java servlets and their advantages. To condense the points, servlets are a Java based solution to dynamic web content delivery. Just as applets are little pieces of Java code that are run on a client's machine (via a browser), servlets are little pieces of Java code that run on the server. The thing James stressed was that all of this is happening via HTTP as the universal transport of the Internet through restrictive firewalls. Some of the advantages of servlets are that they are lightweight and use less machine resources. The architecture is faster than CGI because servlets don't fork a new process for each request, they are loaded and ready, and the same servlet can handle many requests simultaneously. Most importantly, they contain the power of Java - easy to develop, extensive Java Libraries, multi-platform... The number of corporations supporting servlets and Java itself is numerous. James gave examples of servlets in action. He pointed out how a servlet could be used to generate a GIF image on the fly, setting the limits of dynamic presentation to those of your imagination. Another idea was to use servlets as a way to pass objects from one application to another using serialization. He also raised the bar for developers, promoting the concept of Web Applications, that being a collection of HTML, Servlets, JSPs, supporting libraries, and other files all encapsulated in a single archive. This concept will allow the developer greater ease in creating commercial quality web applications for the market place and distributing them as a unit. He concluded his presentation with an explanation of the Jakarta project and a snapshot of where the project is today. SLIDES The Servlet presentation slides in PDF format are available here. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS AT THE MEETING Although many questions were asked, there was only one to which I really, really wanted the answer: When will the nightly builds start? Hopefully, by this weekend. What companies are using servlets to back their business. shop.starwars.com and former Pathfinder site money.com [Someone from the audience] mentioned a rumor that E*Trade uses servlets. (Privately, I asked James) How stable is the code? Although he suggested that you NOT use it for production at this point, he seemed to think the system was stable and that it won't have too many problems with those tasks already being performed by the unintegrated pieces. Where is the best place to get JSP example code? A database connection pool? working-dogs.com, servlets.com There is really not a lot out there yet.
Bob Byron