JavaPolis Facts & Figures

We've today welcomed the 14.000th registered wiki user... hip hip hoera
In addition we've after 6 weeks over 500 podcast subscribers and over 2.000 direct downloads
And in a few weeks we'll release our second JavaPolis DVD (one disc) which will include over 4.5Gb of University, Conference and Quicky talks... including demo's !

Spring 2.0 is a major release that makes the Spring Framework both more powerful and easier to use. In this presentation, Rod will survey the new features of Spring 2.0, before focusing on two of the most important: the introduction of extensible XML configuration, and significant enhancements to Spring AOP.

Spring 2.0 allows Spring configuration to be enhanced with custom XML tags, which can provide valuable abstraction for repeated or complex configuration tasks. Rod will show how to define new tags, and how this capability will benefit all Spring users.

Spring 2.0 makes Spring AOP both simpler and far more powerful, and marks a major milestone for AOP in general. In conjunction with AspectJ 5, Spring 2.0 provides a complete roadmap for AOP usage, from dynamic proxies up to full use of AspectJ weaving, using the same programming model. It becomes possible to use the powerful AspectJ pointcut expression language in Spring AOP, as in AspectJ. Spring AOP can even run AspectJ annotation-style aspects within its proxy based runtime, with the same low cost of adoption as Spring AOP.

BeJUG is organizing a Continuous Integration Workshop for all its JUG members on April 25th (Brussels).

In this workshop, an overview and best practices will be given on how to implement Continuous Integration for small and large projects. Setting this up is one part, but configuring it to easily maintain this in the future and not to fall back in old habbits and ignore the integration tools is not always that straight forward. The first part of the workshop will give an in depth overview of how to start, implement and maintain 'Continuous Integration' in general and the second part will go deeper into the available tools for the Java adept.

More information on the workshop here.

JavaPolis 2005 DVD

Agile development is a phrase that it appears no buzzword-compliant software development project can be without. However, it is a proper understanding of the motivation and practices, rather than the buzzword conformance, that makes the actual difference in development.

The concept of agility has differing (mis)interpretations and (ab)uses. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for Extreme Programming. By contrast, others use it to mean a generic notion of something that is not quite Extreme Programming, but may borrow ideas from it. Some developers may label a project agile just based on the occasional use of JUnit. Others may use the label to justify not writing any documentation or not agreeing to scope or delivery dates. To be fair, not all uses of the term are cynical or misguided, but the term has lost some of its potency through dilution.

This session begins by revisiting the motivation for agile development, and goes on to explore the wide-range perspectives that are encompassed by approaches that can claim to be agile, including both technical and non-technical aspects, the relationship between agility and architecture, the effect of skill and attitude, the role of organisation, and the support of practices and tools.

Only 8 months before JavaPolis 2006 starts, so it's time to brain-storm about this years formula, content, tracks, new ideas etc.
Our kick-off meeting, organized at the Dolmen offices, often starts with some warm food (unfortunately not for me because I speak too much).
Just quickly looking at the pictures from last years kick-off meeting you can identify some patterns, do you notice them ?

The Steering members

For this years edition we've invited 2 new steering members; Guy Crets and Erwin Geirnaert.

Guy is managing partner of Apogado and has a main focus on Integration, that is why he'll be identifying speakers and topics in the messaging environment (SOA, EAI, ESB, etc). Last year Guy presented Secure and Reliable Web Services which brings us to our second new member...

Erwin is partner of Zion Security and as the name expects has an interesting focus on internet and application security. From that angle Erwin will identify some speakers and topics for the 2006 security track. Erwin spoke during JavaPolis 2004 on how to hack J2EE applications, you can check out his talk here.

We've another 2 months to finalize our JavaPolis 2006 theme.
This year, we would like open our JavaPolis theme for competition. So let your imagination go wild and send us your most creative visual and a headline in a viewable format to Valérie, the deadline is May 26th, 2006.
The theme winner will get a free 5-days entrance pass and will see his/her theme on all merchandising material of JavaPolis 2006.

Good luck!

The Tracks

We've also decided to rearrange some of the tracks, this is how it probably will be setup :

• Methodology, lead by Stephan Janssen
• Architecture, lead by Robin Mulkers and Jo Wyns
• Mobile, lead by David Delabassee
• Messaging, lead by Guy Crets
• Enterprise, lead by [~bst@jcs.be] and Hugo Brand
• Java Core, lead by Sven Beauprez
• RIA, Web, ... lead by Frederik Santens
• Hot Beans (Dyn. Languages, Real Time, ...) lead by David Delabassee
• Security, lead by Erwin Geirnaert

JavaPolis Survey

Looking at the official survey and comments received from our attendees, the above initiatives and changes will hopefully improve your overall Conference experience. If we now all bring our sister along we can also address the comment "We want more girls!!"