Post Java DevCon 2004

["Burr Sutter" <sutter@bravepoint.com>]

Wow!  We had 150+ people at our first all day conference for Java
developers.  Andy Hunt was a huge hit with his Pragmatic Project Management
presentation.  A big thank you to our sponsors for participating as
exhibitors and providing numerous door prizes!  Our budget for this event
was over $7000, many months of planning went into the effort and it was a
great success. 

We will be posting a to-be-determined portion of the presentations on the
AJUG website.  

The Summer of 2004 promises to be very exciting.  We have a great line up
for main speakers/topics:
- Java Server Faces : June 15 - The standard framework for the UI tier
- Spring Framework : July 20 - If Struts is for your UI tier and Hibernate
is your data access tier framework, what do you use for the business logic
tier? Spring!
- Tapestry (by its creator Howard Lewis Ship): August 17 - Tired of
following the crowd and working with Struts. There is more than one way to
build a Web UI!  

In addition, we would like to allow some time to cover these topics as well:
- Flex (Macromedia's new framework for using J2EE on the back-end and Flash
as the UI)
- GoF Design Patterns
- Intro to EJB
- Intro to Struts
- Intro Web Services via Apache Axis
- Better Handling of NullPointerExceptions
- CVS
- JUnit
- Ant
- Soft Skills: I had a meeting with a gentlemen who stated "How often have
you had to fire a developer for lack of technical skills?"  More likely the
problems within the team came from poor communication abilities, poor time
management, poor estimation or poor project management.  
We are looking for an individual or a panel of experts who are willing to
speak about those skills that developers should have beyond "codeslinging".
Any volunteers?

And check out our Jobs site: 
http://www.ajug.org/ajugcontext/servlet/getJobs
Two of our sponsors: Anteo Group (www.anteogroup.com) and JBoss
(www.jboss.com) had several (like more than 10) jobs that need to be filled
immediately. 
It is good to be a Java developer again!