[ajug-announce] Special Welcome to AJUG Sponsor: 4t Networks & Special Event: Django/Jython

[Burr Sutter]

Hello AJUG,

While many of you were away on Spring Break :-) we had received notice that
our previous hosting company wished to discontinue their sponsorship of the
Atlanta Java Users Group.  The "AJUG Emergency" email received many great
offers by various Atlanta-based organizations to host ajug.org and provide
rack space for our server.   It is quite a testament to how well connected
the members of our community are.  4t Networks came recommend by Brian
Cochran (thanks Brian!) and they have worked with us through the last few
days to prepare for the move.

Gunnar Hillert had graciously agreed to making the physical move of the
server and we are at a new home. Thank all of you who replied with offers of
assistance.

4t Networks, Inc. is an Atlanta based hosting company founded in 2004. 4t
currently provide services to a wide range of customers, from single
developers to Fortune 500 companies. Their portfolio of hosting solutions
include Virtual Private Server (VPS) accounts, customized Dedicated Servers,
and colocation of existing hardware. For more information, please visit
http://www.4tvirtual.com or contact them at 888-364-2802.

Three very important announcements (please do forward this note to all of
your Java & web development contacts):
- AJUG's April Meeting is on the 15th and is covering "Building a Better
User Experience" by Burk Hufnagel.  This will be a great discussion.
- We have a special event on April 24th with Jim Baker of Jython fame. We
expect a big crowd from some of the non-Java but still web-related user
groups based in Atlanta.   Details below.
- No Fluff Just Stuff is back on May 16-18th with the Greater Atlanta
Software Symposium - Andrew Glover, Neal Ford, Mark Fisher, Jared
Richardson, Howard Lewis Ship -
http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/atlanta/2008/05/index.html -
We've said it enough times now that it is practically a cliche - NFJS
regional symposiums are the best educational event for professional software
developers, period.


-------------------------
Special April Event Notice:
What: Putting Dynamic Languages on the JVM to Work: A Jython Case Study
When: Tuesday, April 24th at 7:00 PM
Who: Jim Baker, Jython Committer and JRuby collaborator
Where: AJUG's Usual Meeting Location

Our Speaker:
Jim Baker has over 15 years of professional software development experience,
focusing on business intelligence, enterprise system management, and
high-performance web applications.  He co-founded both Empact Solutions,
raising $10M in VC financing, and BizLogix. Jim also leads the Front Range
Pythoneers, the Boulder Python Users Group. Jim graduated from Harvard
College, A.B., Computer Science magna cum laude and Brown University, Sc.M.,
Computer Science (and an all-but-dissertation Ph.D. candidate). Jim is a
Jython committer. He first started working with Java in 1995.

Django is a popular web application framework written in Python that is
often compared to Ruby on Rails (RoR). Like RoR, Django enables developers
to quickly build high-performance web apps with a robust database backend.
But many web apps have needs that go beyond this standard three-tier
configuration, even as enhanced with load balancing and caching. Or they
have specific libraries they need to access. Because of these requirements,
developers have turned to Java Enterprise Edition and related solutions,
albeit at a higher development cost. But is it possible to combine the
benefits of both?

Django on Jython is such a solution. By combining the time-to-market
advantages of Django with the heavy-lifting capabilities of the Java
platform, developers get the best of both worlds. Jython is an
implementation of Python that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) via
bytecode compilation. It can therefore readily interoperate with existing
Java code, while also taking advantage of the Python ecosystem. This
includes Django: as committers on the Jython project, we have recently added
support for Django to the trunk version of Jython, and we plan to enhance
this for the forthcoming release of Jython 2.5 this year.

In this talk, we will begin by introducing Django, as well as basic Python
functionality. Jython, like other Python implementations, supports an
interactive object shell. (This is a familiar concept to users who have
worked with Lisp, Ruby, or Smalltalk, and it is a hallmark of a dynamic
language.) This is powerful stuff. We can create a new Jython class that
extends a Java class on the fly; or call methods on Java objects; or work
directly with Django's object-relational mapper. In fact, all of Django's
functionality is available from the object shell. To complement Django, we
will look at one popular module for Python, dateutil, that provides
easy-to-use date and datetime support, including generic parsing, iCalendar
recurrence rules, and relative deltas, such as the last week of month for a
given date.


Sincerely,
Burr (burr.sutter at gmail.com)
770-714-3292
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