We have another CJUG Meeting on February 15, 2011. Ray Ploski of Red Hat will talk about Drools. You can find info on the CJUG site here. You can RSVP for it here.
The past few CJUG meetings have gone pretty well. We are now having them at CME. It has really helped our attendance. We used to be lucky to get a dozen people. Now we get about 30. The RSVP software we are using is called gathers.us. It was made by a few guys here in Chicago. It uses the “freemium” model, and free events are limited to 50 responses. A few times we hit that limit. If we keep hitting it consistently we might have to either find something else or convince the GathersUs developers to increase that limit. They have responded to some feedback from me and a few other people, so we will see what happens.
For future CJUG meetings, there are some plans in the works. I will probably give a presentation in March on Android. Jeff Palmer of the Chicago Groovy Users Group will give one in April about Grails. Someone from a local consulting firm might be able to give one about hooking mobile apps up to JEE servers.
I would also like to get some presentations about some trends in the software industry. I think that the current threading model of concurrency is being replaced by the Actor model. The Akka library in Scala can also be used in Java. I would like to have a presentation on that. Also, NoSQL is gaining some traction. I would like to have a presentation on MongoDB, showing how to use it and some examples with the Java API.
If anyone could do these (or point me to existing presentations that I could use), that would be great. Alternatively, I could collaborate on these with someone. We could set up a GitHub account and hash out a presentation deck and some code; I think using Maven would be the best bet. I do not have a Mac, so the deck would have to be in OpenOffice.
Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Vatican Virgil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil. Note: Some images may contain spoilers.
