Java Hellenic User Group Event 6.10 .this is why I love the Java community!

So yes, another JHUG event has just finished! I am really happy and satisfied! We had more than 150 participants (170?), excellent talks, nice room with all the appropriate equipment, nice food (thanks to the sponsor), people interested on the topics. I had also the chance to meet (ex)fellow coworkers -now days you rarely have that kind of opportunity - to see old friends!

So we started at 11. I did the opening key note for 15 minutes. A brief hello from the jHUG team, and then 10 questions and 10 presents, for those who dared to answer my questions! Actually I did not ask about Java, I had an idea on putting famous Java Stars and champions on the screen and - ask the audience - Who is he? Quite fun actually. it's a shame, I had only 5 JHUG TShirts and 5 Books (the books were provided by the Sun JUGs Program Team Thanks Aaron).

After my talk we had the first proper session from the sponsor team. J.Jannes,C.Simatos,G.Kalfopoulos. The guys gave a brief overview of the project currently developing and then an excellent and very helpfull presentation on Improving Code Quality. Actually it was the very first time that I saw lots of friends at the audience to be so satisfied with the sponsor session. Everyone quoted that the topic was very up to the point, and the team received lots of questions after the session.You know ts really defficult to get the respect from an audience full of different kinds of developers.

Next one, was Dr Heinz Kabutz. Heinz has been supporting our JUG from the every beginning and we are always happy to have him as a speaker. Heinz talked about concurrency in Java and 10 laws (or mistakes) usually shown up in our code. Very nice talk! As the time goes by Heinz is integrating examples from his life n Greece, and it is always enjoyable to hear him talking about Java while is using examples from the modern greek life style or reality.

After Heinz it was time for Roman Strobl! Netbeans 6 the only IDE you need! I could from the audience that lots of them were satisfied from what they just saw - I mean the progress of Netbeans! I have been talking with lots of them during the break and they were saying You know I have been using netbeans a long time ago or Forte, I am very please to see that this product now is progressing and is innovating in some areas like Swing, or scripting languae support or J2EE support out of the box!

After the lunch break - wow everyone was full I have to tell - we had the core J2EE talks!We were very happy to host for the first time, in such a public and free event - one of the co- Founders of Interface 21, Alef Arendsen. I was talking to Alef the other day and I explained to him that we would like to see more often Interface21 people.participating in such events, he agreed and promised to be again in Athens soon enough! His talk was about OSGi, actually it was one of the best intros to OSGi I have ever had. The audience seemed to be very interested in the pros and cons of Spring OSGi support, and at the end there was a small discussion regarding the adoption of OSGi or the Java Module Architecture. I wish and lots of other members of JHUG wish to have more often Spring Evangelists here in Athens.

After Spring .it was some time for JVM Clustering! Jonas Boner on stage for the first time in Greece! Jonas talked about Terracota and their approach on Clustering in the JVM level! Lots of people during the talk were amazed - I could here some of them saying- _Wow does this thing exists? It looks amazing - how they managed to do it?'. Jonas also did some demos to show how you could use Terracota clustering! Really interesting stuff, actually it was my first time listeing so many details regarding this technology. I hope we can have Jonas again some time in Athens, and I am really happy it was his first time presenting in Greece, in our java user group event!

Alexis M.Pouchkine and GlassFish. Having Alexis in Athens was a great target and milestone for me! I have been talking to various Sun people, during JavaOne and people from the Sun Developer Outreach team. I thought that the greek audience should have some chance on listening to the GlassFish team tha is wokring on such an interesting project in the Application Server - sector! I was really happy that it was a JHUG's initiative to bring such an important GlassFish guy, and talk about this server. As a community we believe in choice, our events are full of different technologies, many choices many opportunities! Alexis _s presentation was very nice and I have to admit, that despite the fact I am dedicated JBoss user (I am also using JBoss when I want to blog something regarding J2EE) I will give GlassFish a try, and explore it's potentials. Anyway application servers it is really a field, which I really follow in terms of developments, news updates and new products!I have to thank Roman Strobl as a fellow JUG leader who helped me, get in touch with Alexis and have him in Athens!

At the end of the day, everyone was happy, us the JHUG team, the audience and the sponsor! We have been working from August and on, in order to organize this event, and it was really a success! I am very happy for various reasons.

a) Our small JUG is making steps forward on establishing a dedicated developers community. Our first event was less than 100 people, now after almost 1.5 year we are very close to 200. I can see more people participating in our forums, some others (still few) contributing to translations, and lots more asking the same question _When is it going to be the next one?From my point of view, our JUG now starts to meet it's goals - which are to make a community, offer them events and some sort of unofficial training, interconnect the developers.I can see that it's now happening, various developers freelancers or not come to the events, exchange cards, talk with sponsors, talk with some students it is REALLY happening - and we should continue working harder now. As a greek Java developer, I believe that as a community of developers we have lots of potential and I want to work hard on this exposing the power of the greek Java developers.

b) I was listening to a talk during the event and at some point, it was very clear to me, one more reason to love Java! Freedom and Choice!Costas and George were talking about the variety of tools they have been using in order to preserve code quality and standards on their projects - variety!Alef was talking about Spring, then Alexis was talking about GlassFish, Jonas was talking about clustering, but then again Alexis was talking about clustering in a different way, and then again Alef was proposing an alternative to some other technologies, and then Roman was introducing Netbeans, while Heinz was demo-ing in InteliJ or other were using eclipse and then we had the JBoss Dev team leader talking with a Glassfish Guy and shaking hands - the coolest photo of the event :D!

As you may understand the power of the Java ecosystem is freedom and choice! In a very active ecosystem the java developer or architect hasa variety of enterprise ready components, to pick in order to build his project/ product!This is the real beauty of Java and this is why we love Java because we feel free!

Thank you all for coming! Keep on .Java Coding!