Abstract:
Every IT project has to deal with risk. The Standish Group states that in 2004, fifty-three percent of IT projects were late, over budget, or delivered with inadequate functionality. Eighteen percent of projects failed outright, with failure-to-deliver rates even higher for the larger projects.

David will present an overview, requirements, and logical architecture for a solution concept called IT Risk Advisor implemented as a set of remote services through a Service Oriented Architecture. Rather than matching compatible personality profiles, IT Risk Advisor matches a compatible IT project context with a compatible (best fit) IT Risk Profile.

The session will cover:

• Overview of IT Risk Advisor
• Benefits
• Requirements overview including both end user and system actor usage scenarios
• Capturing the IT Risk Profile
• Web services exposed
• Logical Architecture, using the SunTone Architecture Methodology analysis framework
• Predictive risk data model (58 predictive dimensions)
• Review example usages
• Review of output generated (fits, misfits, patterns, risk subscores, risk index)

David will solicit feedback from the audience for input into creating an open source project for IT Risk Advisor.

Bio:
David Hecksel is a Senior SOA and Business Integration architect at Sun Microsystems, having recently joined the organization that was formerly known as SeeBeyond Software. David has been with Sun Microsystems for six years, five of them in the Sun Java Center. David's interests revolve around the areas that turn software development teams into effective software development teams.

Particular areas of interest include:

• Application Architecture
• Agile Software Development
• Service Oriented Architecture
• Patterns

David has given ten presentations at JavaOne over the years 1997 to 2005, on topics including Swing development, Application Architecture, J2EE Deployment, Agile Development, and a J2EE Interactive Voice Response reference architecture. In addition, David has spoken at SDExpo 2005, and participated in the Pattern Language Of Practice 2004 conference, where he had 5 of his 28 patterns on IT Effectiveness workshopped.

Prior to Sun, David was Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Axtive Software in Dallas (1996 - 2000), where he invented, architected, and co-developed the e.Monogram Web Personalization One to One Marketing Server. Prior to being acquired, e.Monogram was nominated as a finalist for "Best Internet Debut" product by the Software Publishers Association. Prior to Axtive Software, David spent 11 years at IBM Corporation, doing commercial software development on various networking software and storage management products.

David has a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters in Business Administration from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Meeting Sponsor: The mission of edaption solutions, inc. is to successfully assist technology dependent companies in accomplishing strategic business initiatives through implementation of Internet based solutions, specifically using Java™ and J2EE™ technologies.

Abstract:
EJB3 succeeds wildly at simplifying the EJB tier, but one criticism of EJB3 is that its features are only available to proper EJB3 beans. What about the rest of your application?

Seam is a new open source application framework that provides a unified component model for all layers of your application. In Seam, presentation–tier components and business–tier components are the same type of thing, giving you complete flexibility in how you architect and layer your application.

Seam provides declarative state management, allowing components to focus on their core concerns, rather than on how values are shuttled to/from HTTP request and session state. Seam even provides additional context options, including a conversation context, where Seam manages state along a series of requests, and business process context, where Seam allows your components to participate in business processes spanning multiple sessions.

In this talk, I'll explain these core Seam concepts, show an application written using Seam (using EJB3, JavaServer Faces, Facelets and jBPM), and talk about how I think these facets of enterprise application development will continue to change over the coming year.

Bio:
Norman Richards is a JBoss developer living in Austin, TX. He has written several popular Java books, including XDoclet in Action, and JBoss: A Developer's Notebook.

Meeting Sponsor: JBoss, Inc., develops the open source JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS), and its core technologies. JEMS delivers proven performance in mission-critical environments, and is backed by world-class support and service — all at a dramatically lower cost structure than proprietary systems. For more information, visit www.jboss.com.

Abstract:
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) techniques give web applications the potential to mimic the response model of their rich-client counterparts, without the necessity of plugins.

This discussion will cover the basics of AJAX, several frameworks that make implementing AJAX in Java-based web applications a snap, the potential "gotchas," and best practices for implementing AJAX in your web applications.

The presentation is here.

Bio:
George Lawniczak has been developing business solutions for Fortune 500 corporations for the past 15 years. He is a Sun Certified Web Component Developer for the Java 2 platform. He also has experience with Microsoft technologies.

Meeting Sponsor: Technisource is a leading national provider of IT and software engineering services offering Practice-based Services, IT and Engineering Staff Augmentation and Direct Hire services. Founded in 1987, Technisource is headquartered in Little Rock, AR, and has more than 30 offices across the United States. With a customer base of Fortune 500 and middle market companies, Technisource represents a wide variety of industries including: insurance, banking and finance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, aerospace, defense, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and government.

Abstract:
App Servers are designed for fine-grained locking, sub-gigabyte heaps, and a limited number of processors (1-4 CPUs). However, is this really what Java programming is all about? With the promise of automated garbage collection (GC), language-level locking, and threads, developers originally thought they could simply express their algorithms through the language, and the JVM would take care of managing the complexity of these resources.

This talk discusses how alternative locking strategies, advanced GC algorithms, and large numbers of processors per JVM, can significantly improve the performance of J2EE applications. Furthermore, the speaker will discuss how such features will affect the way Java applications are written in the future, by using caching, coarse-grained locks, embarrassingly parallel algorithms, and large numbers of threads.

Bio:
Bob Pasker is deputy CTO with Azul Systems. He has been designing and developing networking, communications, transaction processing, and database products for 25 years. As one of the founders of WebLogic, the first independent Java company (acquired by BEA Systems in 1998), he was the chief architect of the WebLogic Application Server. Bob has provided technical leadership and management for numerous award-winning technologies, including the TribeLink series of routers and remote access devices, and the TMX transaction processing system. Bob graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from San Francisco State University and holds a Masters degree from Brown University.

Meeting Sponsor: Jinfonet Software is the leading provider of embedded reporting solutions for enterprise applications. JReport, the company's flagship product, is a 100% Java reporting solution that includes a report development environment that can embed seamlessly into any Java application, leverages J2EE standards, and delivers actionable reports via the Web. Key features include a rich set of APIs for integrating any level of reporting functionality into an application, the ability to access any enterprise data source, built-in security with single sign-on capabilities, and the ability to scale through multiple CPUs or clustered servers to meet growing reporting needs. JReport's intuitive design and deployment tools make report creation, review, on-the-fly modification and distribution fast and easy. JReport, in its 7th release cycle, is in production today at more than 25,000 applications supporting millions of end-users at over 900 companies worldwide. More information is available online at www.jinfonet.com.

Abstract:
When most people think of Spring, thoughts of dependency injection (DI) come to mind. Indeed, Spring supports loose-coupling of application components through DI. But DI is only one part of the story. Where DI decouples application components from each other, aspect-oriented programming decouples components from those higher-level concerns such as logging, security, and transactions.

Spring has always had a stake in AOP. Until recently, Spring's brand of AOP has been cumbersome to use and not nearly as powerful as alternatives such as AspectJ. But with the 2.0 release, Spring's AOP features have been greatly enhanced and are now much easier to work with.

In this session, we'll explore Spring AOP, seeing how it's now easier than ever to add aspects to your Spring-enabled applications. You'll also see how Spring and AspectJ can work together to provide the full decoupling power of aspects along with DI.

Bio:
Craig Walls has been developing software professionally for over 11 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action, both published by Manning. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, daughter, 8 birds, 4 dogs, 2 cats, and an ever-fluctuating number of tropical fish.

Meeting Sponsor: Do you have an idea for a new application? Using Java, we write it once, and it will run on any platform, making enhancements and maintenance a snap.

Standalone Platform Independent Java Application Development — Do you want one code base for all the platforms you support? Call Stephen Davidson & Associates, Inc., and we will help you port your existing codebase to Java.

Systems Integration — Stephen Davidson & Associates, Inc. can integrate your Legacy systems and applications with modern Java and Web/J2EE WebBased Applications.

Steve Davidson has been active in the Java Community for several years, and besides sponsoring the occasional JavaMug & J2EE Meeting, has been the Chair of the J2EESig several times, and is a past Board Member of JavaMug.

Abstract:
This talk covers by example the core of the Hibernate Object/Relational Mapping framework; that is, in a hands-on manner.

What does this mean? Two things:

• Rather than spending 1.5 hours going from slide to slide, passively covering various aspects of the Hibernate framework, you'll be actively building a sample application, modeling, persisting, and querying information using Hibernate 3.1,
• Hibernate today is a mature and rich framework consisting of many features. Discussion of features outside of the Hibernate "Core" will be sacrificed for the sake of presenting Hibernate in an active, "by example" style.

No a-priori knowledge of Hibernate is assumed. We'll cover the basics of Hibernate v3.1, XML mappings, the Hibernate Query Language (HQL), the Criteria API, custom UserTypes, Components, and more! This talk does not discuss auxiliary topics such as the EJB 3 persistence API, Annotations, or integrating Hibernate in managed (J2EE) environments.

The presentation is here.

Bio:
Eitan Suez is a programmer living and working in Austin, Texas. He has been programming in Java since 1995, and is a certified Java Programmer. Eitan is the author of an open source Java documentation system named ashkelon on sourceforge. Eitan speaks on the "No Fluff Just Stuff" series of programming Symposia on a variety of topics including Java Documentation Tools, XML Marshalling, Cascading Stylesheets, Naked Objects, and the State Machine Compiler. Eitan also helps organize and run the Austin Java Users Group. Eitan maintains a weblog on <http://java.net>.

Meeting Sponsor: With more than 100 locations in North America, Robert Half Technology is a leading provider of IT professionals on a project and full-time basis for initiatives ranging from web development and systems integration to network security and technical support. Robert Half Technology is a division of Robert Half International, which is included on Fortune magazine's list of "America's Most Admired Companies." For additional information on how Robert Half Technology can support your job search, call 214-468-9191 or visit us at rht.com.

Abstract:
This talk is about how we do Agile at Google.

We talk about the costs of introducing Agile, what we've done to mitigate them, what's worked, what hasn't, and the big wins we've had from making the effort.

You'll take away ideas for how you can introduce Agile into your own organizations, and a perspective on what's worked inside one of the giants of the software world.

The presentation is here.

Bio:
Ian McFarland is one of the true old hands of Java development. He has been working with Java since version 1.0a2, and actually wrote the first client-server Java application ever: a demo seating reservation system used for the Java product announcement at SunWorld in 1995. He is the author of Mastering Tomcat Development, published by J. Wiley and Sons, and has written articles for Java Developer's Journal, Developer.com, and the Java Developer Connection. He was on the launch team at HotWired, served as Java Evangelist for Symantec Visual Cafe, and led the engineering team at Friendster as it grew from 120,000 to 3 Million users in 6 months, and then doubled two more times in the following 6 months.

Ian has been a practising Agilist for four years, has spoken on agile development on numerous occasions, and has worked on demanding applications for several major clients since joining Pivotal Computer Systems. He is a frequent trainer and speaker on agile practices, and has developed courseware for clients as well.

Meeting Sponsor: Google provided the sponsorship for the July meeting.

Abstract:
UML is maturing so that UML can represent Java, and even generate executable code. Daniel Brookshier will start with a quick overview of the new UML 2.0, and what Java looks like in UML. But the core of the talk is about a huge shift that lets UML generate the core parts of Java from UML models, via a technique called Model Driven Architecture (MDA), and is also generating honest runnable Java code. In the past, you were lucky to get the structure of Java applications. Now, you get Spring, Hibernate, Struts, JBoss, and the database generated for you. Think of this as Java 5 Annotations and XDoclets on steroids (in fact, it can generate annotations and XDoclet tags for you, along with a lot of other code).

Is this is going to change your life? Has the machine made you obsolete? For a business, it saves time and money by making developers much more productive. Learn this or get left behind? Maybe....

Modeling straight to code is a productivity leap, but your job is secure. No tool will be 100%. Modeling shifts where you write custom code, and how you design. The real good news is that UML and MDA can make being a developer more fun, and throw out the drudgery. Modeling also puts a lot more UML into XP and Agile methodologies, while making them more productive. How? Come learn and see.

This is not a sales talk. There is free/open-source MDA, and UML tools adequate to the task are free too. We will, however, give away a great piece of UML software, and give out evaluation keys to folks that want to try our tools.

Bio:
Daniel Brookshier is a world-class Java consultant, author, instructor, and speaker with 20 years of experience. Daniel is the Chief Architect for No Magic, Inc., the makers of MagicDraw UML. Mr. Brookshier's knowledge of software development covers many industries, including transportation, telecom, wireless, healthcare, B2B, petroleum engineering, law, insurance, software tools, and aerospace. He is an international consultant with contract assignments in the US, Norway, the UK, and China. Mr. Brookshier is the founder of three Java user groups in Dallas, the writer of several Java programming books, and he has published numerous articles about Java in industry magazines. Daniel is a recognized expert on Java software development, UML design, Java Management, enterprise software, Peer-to-Peer (P2P), and JavaBeans component development.

Meeting Sponsor: Technisource is a leading national provider of IT and software engineering services offering Practice-based Services, IT and Engineering Staff Augmentation and Direct Hire services. Founded in 1987, Technisource is headquartered in Little Rock, AR, and has more than 30 offices across the United States. With a customer base of Fortune 500 and middle market companies, Technisource represents a wide variety of industries including: insurance, banking and finance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, aerospace, defense, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and government.

Abstract:
Eclipse is a Java integrated development environment (IDE), a generic IDE and application framework, an open source project and foundation, a community, and eco-system. During this talk, we'll introduce Eclipse in the larger sense before we drill down into a discussion of the Eclipse component model, the creation of plug-ins for Eclipse to extend the development environment, and building rich clients using Eclipse technology.

Using a combination of presentation and demonstration, we will show you how to use Eclipse's Plug-in Development Environment to build plug-ins to extend the development environment by hooking into various services provided by the platform. We'll show how plug-ins can be designed for use in the development environment and in standalone rich client applications using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

Time and interest permitting, we will discuss other Eclipse projects, including the use of the Web Tools Project for constructing J2EE components (servlets, JSPs, and EJBs) and managing application servers.

The presentation is here.

Bio:
Wayne Beaton is employed by The Eclipse Foundation where he works as an evangelist, spreading the word and helping folks adopt Eclipse technologies. Wayne has extensive experience in object-oriented software development, and is a strong proponent of refactoring, unit testing, and agile development methodologies.

Meeting Sponsor: A premier provider of information technology (IT) solutions since 1969, Ajilon Consulting has over 13,000 IT Professionals worldwide with practice areas in Software Development and Integration, Infrastructure Management, and Software Quality Assurance.

Abstract:
Like many Java developers, I looked down my nose at JavaScript for a long time. It seemed like a toy compared to Java – it was slow, buggy, and weird. I recommended that my customers stay away from it as much as possible, keeping the logic on the server, in Java. When I had to do JavaScript, I would learn just enough to get the job done, and then get out as fast as I could.

But I was wrong. The problem wasn't JavaScript, it was how I learned JavaScript, and how I looked at it. Once I stopped thinking of it as a toy version of Java, and realized it was actually a serious programming language in its own right (that happened to borrow a lot of its syntax from Java) I started to enjoy JavaScript programming. And I'm not ashamed to admit it! In this talk, I hope to help you unlearn some of the things you think you know about JavaScript, and learn to love this fun, powerful language. You'll write better JavaScript code, and enjoy it more.

The presentation is here.

Bio:
Glenn Vanderburg was one of the founders of JavaMUG, way back in December of 1995. These days he spends most of his time writing Ruby and JavaScript, but still knows his way around Java pretty well. Conference appearances this year include The Ajax Experience, RailsConf, JAOO, RubyConf, and numerous appearances on the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium tour.

Meeting Sponsor: No Magic, Inc. develops and supports the award winning software modeling tool MagicDraw. No Magic's Corporate, Sales, Services, and Training headquarters are located in Plano, TX.

MagicDraw is No Magic's visual UML modeling and CASE tool with teamwork support. It has won awards for its usability, ease of use, and modeling prowess.

MagicDraw is designed for Software Analysts, Programmers, QA Engineers, Documentation Writers, and Business Analysts. This dynamic and versatile development tool facilitates analysis and design of Object Oriented (OO) systems and databases. It provides the industry's best code engineering mechanism, with full round-trip support for Java, Java Byte Code, C#, C++, CORBA IDL, CIL, XML Schema, WSDL, and database through DDL and JDBC.

The tool also supports other modeling languages, including BPMN (with export to BPEL), and our next version has full support SysML and DoDAF. We support UML 2.0, and can load several versions of XMI plus the standard XMI 2.1, and even EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) files. There is a conversion tool for Rational Rose if you want to save money over Rose support, and have a much higher quality tool that meets your needs for Agile and other development methodologies.

MagicDraw is also at the center of Model Driven Architecture (MDA). MagicDraw is the number one choice for MDA, and we are proud to be the tool of choice for many MDA vendors and open source projects like AndoMDA.org.

To learn more and get a full evaluation version of MagicDraw, contact Curtis Bryant at 214–291–9100. Let Curtis know that you are a member of this list, or of another Java user group, for our special user group discount. We have special educational and volume discounts too. We also have a local training center to learn UML and about our tools. Visit our web site.

Abstract:
Since the term Ajax was coined, significant interest has arisen from developers who see the techniques it offers as a way to break away from limitations of traditional web development. Along the way, a number of toolkits have appeared to help developers work through the more difficult aspects of Ajax programming, and provide out-of-the-box solutions to common needs.

Joshua Gertzen will be discussing some "high-level" challenges associated with Ajax programming, and how different frameworks have attempted to solve those issues. Utilizing examples from the Java-based ThinWire Ajax Framework, Joshua will describe how ThinWire's unique approach to web development simplifies and/or eliminates these issues.

Here are the main points to be discussed:

1. Overview of the four levels of Ajax usage as defined by the Gartner group.
2. Security concerns surrounding communication and client-side code.
3. Performance issues to be aware of in browser and over the network.
4. Debugging considerations and managing application complexity.
5. Flow control management and state handling in Ajax applications.
6. Introduction to ThinWire and how it addresses these issues.
7. Building a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with ThinWire.

Throughout the presentation Joshua will be accepting questions from the audience.

Bio:
Joshua Gertzen is a professional computer programmer with over ten years experience in software development. His knowledge and experience range from utilizing differing programming languages, development frameworks, and architectural patterns, to troubleshooting complex architectural issues.

Over the last six years, he has played a key role in building the technology infrastructure at Custom Credit Systems, a Dallas-based software company. His primary focus over that time has been building web architectures that utilize DHTML and/or Ajax programming techniques. Additionally, he has been the primary architect behind building, maintaining, and enhancing the ThinWire Ajax Framework, which was recently open sourced.

Joshua regularly posts updates to his blog.

Meeting Sponsor: National in scope and resources, yet local in our service response, Technology Business Partners applies its competencies to help companies respond to their Information Technology permanent or temporary staffing challenges in Dallas and throughout North Texas. Our client base includes companies in a broad range of industries, as well as not-for-profit organizations and government agencies. See our brochure here.

Abstract:
Apache Geronimo is the open source J2EE server project of the Apache Software Foundation. The presentation will give a brief history of Geronimo, and how IBM became involved in the project. It will describe what functionality is provided by Geronimo, and the collection of open source libraries it contains. You will see how to build a customized server using Apache Maven, and how to install and configure J2EE applications with the administration console and the command line interface. The presentation will also describe Geronimo's new plugin architecture and the ongoing plugin repository efforts. Of interest to developers will be Geronimo's Eclipse plugin for running/debugging applications.

Bio:
Paul McMahan is employed by IBM where he works as an advisory software engineer, and a committer on the Apache Geronimo project. Paul's main expertise is in J2EE web applications, and he is a strong proponent of emerging web technologies such as AJAX. Before joining IBM in 2000, Paul was a research associate with the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee where he implemented repositories for scientific software using the open source LAMP platform.

Meeting Sponsor: IBM, the world's largest IT services and consulting provider, helps clients integrate IT with business value. IBM services business delivers integrated, flexible and resilient processes across companies and through business partners, enabling clients to save money and transform their businesses to be more competitive.