2006 AJUG Meeting Announcements

[Burr Sutter]

Dear AJUG Members,

Our recent Java DevCon 2006 was a tremendous success with 325+ in
attendance for the all day event.  Our single largest Java Developers
conference in the Atlanta area. Please continue to invite your
colleagues who are interested in software development and also
consider joining our member's discussion email list.  Instructions can
be found at www.ajug.org/resources.html.

Thank you to Sun, Anteo and JBoss for participating and financially
supporting the event as well as all the Atlanta Java Users Group
functions.

Our upcoming events:
June 20th - Developing an Enterprise Service Bus
July 18th - AJAX State of the Union
September 19th - James Gosling

June 20th
Developing in an Enterprise Service Bus

There is a lot of buzz about SOA and ESB these days, but what does it
mean to actually implement on one? This talk will answer questions
like:

What is an ESB?
* Where and why would an architect and developer use one?
* What tools are available for working with an ESB?
* How to use and implement various core ESB concepts such as routers,
transformers, and messaging connectors?

ESB's vendors are promising easy integration and reuse by providing
frameworks for implementing Service Oriented Architectures. But many
vendors have clouded the principals and patterns needed by the actual
developer with a lot of buzzwords and fluff.

That said, SOA does seem to be gaining traction. IT organizations are
looking for more reuse of their applications and better agility in
responding to changing business needs. If adopted, the applications we
build may be required to plug in to the corporate ESB. As developers
we need to know how to partition our applications into functional
services that can be used and reused by external applications. We also
need to know how to find and reuse existing services so we can deliver
more quickly.

There are many patterns and tools found in ESB frameworks that can
make a developer's life much easier. These frameworks provide the
tools to handle many common problems such as message routing and
message transformation. It is often the case that a standard POJO can
be exposed to over a dozen different messaging technologies ranging
from Web Services to email to flat file simply by making configuration
changes within the ESB. For existing applications, developers can use
the frameworks to expose existing components such as EJBs as services
in the ESB using simple configuration.

Although popular, application integration is not the only application
of ESBs. These services based frameworks are also being applied in the
areas of grid computing, networking, and as simple messing layer
abstractions inside applications.

ESBs have their challenges. Services often have asynchronous
interfaces and this mode of development can sometimes be confusing. It
is also difficult to manage the configuration in an ESB that covers
many different applications. It is not uncommon for entire
applications (or versions of the applications) to come and go as
services participating in the ESB.


Bio
Brian Cochran and Eric Stevens own and operate Atlanta CS, a software
consulting firm specializing in ESB technology. They have spent the
last year and a half defining and deploying ESBs in grid computing
environments. Their ESB deployments have fulfilled very high
transaction volumes and the integration of 100's of disparate
technologies ranging from various legacy enterprise systems to
millions of embedded devices.

Prior to founding Atlanta CS, Brian's experience as a Lead Architect
found him creating high volume transactional systems and analytics
products now deployed at several fortune 100 companies in the
insurance and financial services industry. Brian holds a BS in
computer science from Georgia Tech with Highest Honors.

Eric Stevens has extensive experience in software architecture and
software products in the financial services and insurance industries.
Mr. Stevens has led numerous projects involving frameworks, scheduling
systems, analytical systems, and site management systems. Mr. Stevens
is an Honors graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

July 18
AJAX State of the Union
Presented by the co-founder of www.Ajaxian.com, Ben Galbraith.  Ben
was recently one of the most popular speakers at JavaOne 2006, The
AJAX Experience, a frequent speaker on the No Fluff Just Stuff
symposium series and is the co-host of the Audible AJAX podcast.  Ben
was recently the moderator of the AJAX Smackdown at JavaOne which
included RIA (rich internet application) toolkits such as Dojo, DWR,
Flex and the vernable Swing!

August 15
TBD

September 19
James Gosling and Movie
This special event is sponsored by Sun Microsystems and includes a
special visit by James Gosling, the father of Java!  We expect close
to 400 people for this event to be held at Atlantic Station's Regal
Cinemas!