For me 2015 hacktivism is officially closed, this year I had the opportunity to attend my first Java One and met some of my development heroes, folks from another JUGs, being trapped at Patricia’s hurricane (no kidding), and bring a huge amount of Java t-shirts to Guatemala. I must say thanks to the people that made this trip possible, special acknowledgments to Nichole Scott from Oracle, my peers at Nabenik that gratefully sponsored my trip and the Guatemala Java User Group for allowing me to take advantage of the Java One ticket :-D.

I think that every techie has a list of conferences to attend before die, as 2015 my top five is:

• JavaOne (2015 finally)
• Gentoo Miniconf
• OSCON
• Forum Internacional de Sofware Livre – FISL (2013 as a speaker yey!)
• Convención de Informatica Guatemala (2005 – now dead, but it made the list for nostalgia)

Although I had some health issues due stress, Java One and San Francisco were lifetime experiences. As each conference I’ve attended, it has its goods and bads but in general you can feel a strong sense of community between attendants, from Pivotal to Red Hat (and Microsoft), from the peer that shares a beer with you and turns out to be a Java Champion to the people that speaks another languages with you, Java One is about community making awesome things in IT. Programming languages aren’t eternal but I can state that the differential factor that raised 20-year languages like Java and JavaScript among the others is the community.

Random photos:

In a different scale but in the same sense of community, the Guatemala Java User Group held its yearly conference Java Day Guatemala.

I’ve been involved directly in the organization of 2 Java Days and spoken in three. As I said in our keynote, for me GuateJUG has been the most successful user group where I’ve participated. Characterized by pragmatism, openness and community structure since its inception, GuateJUG became one of the strongest user groups in Central America, the integration between industry, academia, Open Source communities, Free Software communities and HR people looking for the next generation of developers is unique.

As a special occasion we held a traditional birthday celebration, including birthday cake and mexican piñatas. It was great to share words with some old friends and meet new IT enthusiasts, as a matter of fact we also sang «Happy birthday Java and happy birthday GuateJUG».

Video and some more random photos:

I hope to see you the next year in Java One and Java Day :-).

About the book

Pages: 362
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Release: Aug 2013
ISBN-10: 978-1-4493-7016-9
ISBN-13: 1-4493-7016-0

Book details

I received this book as a part of the now dead O’Reilly users group program. When I asked for this book I was specially interested due comments from my development peers . . . and most importantly because I was in the middle of a Software Architecture definition.

I’m writing this review after 7 months of using it on daily basis, basically because our development stack is composed by AngularJS on the front-end and JavaEE 7 on the back-end (with a huge bias to the Hat company). At the office we have a small books collection (because IT books are pretty dead after five years), and Aurun’s book is our prefered book for the «Java EE 7 rescue kit».

If I have to choose two adjectives for this book I must say «quick and versatile», this book deserves all of its fame because it has the balance between a good reference book and a user friendly introductory book, most of the IT books don’t achieve it.

I don’t wanna copy the index page but I have the following favorite chapters:

• Servlets
• RESTFul Web Services
• SOAP Web Services
• JSON Processing
• Enterprise Java Beans
• Context and Dependency Injection
• Bean Validation
• Java Transactions
• Java Persistence

Most of the book samples are based on Glassfish, and is easy to guess why looking at the publication date. However, talking from my true-heavy-metal-monkey-developer-architect experience, this book uses only pure JavaEE 7 apis and I’ve been able to run/use the samples on Wildfly without issues.

For those that are looking a good book for JavaEE 7 development, on any of the certified Java EE 7 servers this is a must.

Highlights

• Good balance between tutorial and reference.
• Few content compared to the Java EE Tutorial but still in the point.
• The samples should work on any Java EE 7 server.

Could be better

• WebSockets section is small in relation to the other chapters, it feels incomplete.
• The cover brings to my mind the good old days when Glassfish was that application server that everybody is talking.

As I described previously, GuateJUG held a conference circuit promoting its yearly conference Java Day Guatemala 2015.This activity was motivated by Java’s 20th anniversary and specially due GuateJUG’s 5th anniversary.So… how do you achieve a tour …

In GuateJUG we arrived to our fifth year, consequently I must start this post with a «thanks to everybody that made this possible (developers, advocates, supporters, sponsors, friends, family, and other-UG)».

This year has been a special year for GuateJUG and Java in general, in February we were very excited about being featured at Java Magazine (a little step for .gt developers, a great step for our user group), and as every inch of the web knows 2015 is the year of the 20 years of Java, another anniversary that came in hand to believe that 2015 is the year of Java reborn.

Hence, at GuateJUG we added to our regular activities a conference circuit called GuateJUG Tour.

As many of our activities, this is some kind of spontaneous tour, hence we’ll be adding dates as new cities are confirmed (Guatemala is a small country so it’s possible to confirm in very short notice).

The tour started on September 26 and I’m confirmed as a speaker in three cities, so I’ll be collecting my slides in this post for quick reference :).

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