Welcome to the official page of the Brussels Java User Group (BruJUG). More details about our mission and the answers to the most intriguing questions can be found in the “Q&A” and “Activities” pages.

Agenda Season 2010-2011:

Calendar of Events for BruJUG Season 2010-2011 (Wiki)

Confirmed Events (all events are held in English):

• Thu 14.10.2010 – Guillaume Bort, Play! Framework
• Thu 28.10.2010 – Anton Epple, NetBeans Rich-Client Platform Development
• Wen 17.11.2010 – Special DEVOXX Event (see below)
• Thu 16.12.2010 – Course – John Rizzo, JPA/Hibernate Lifecycle
• Thu 17.02.2011 – Igor Drobiazko & Ulrich Stärk,Tapestry 5 Night
• Wen 30.03.2011 – John Rizzo, On Vaadin}>
• Thu 28.04.2011 – Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE – GlassFish and OSGi
• Fri 27.05.2011 – Michael Huettermann, Agile ALM with Agile Strategies and Lightweight Tools

Special DEVOXX Event:

17.11.2010 – Anton Epple & Geertjan Wielenga, NetBeans, a Swing OSGi Desktop Application Framework (Anton’s conference of 28.10 is about Netbeans RCP in general, the DEVOXX special is about the Netbeans RCP in the OSGi world. Both conferences are complementary, the second one is much more advanced).

Registration via JUGEvents:

Registration Events 2010/2011

No registration on JUGEvents required to register for BruJUG events. Confirmation Mail may take 10 minutes to be received. In case of problems or later canceling, please drop us a mail.

Upcoming:
Thu 14.10.2010 – Guillaume Bort, Play! Framework
Thu 28.10.2010 – Anton Epple, NetBeans Rich-Client Platform Development

Java Knights Belgium is a mailing list for Belgian Java Freelancers. It represents a central place to keep in touch, exchange experiences and opportunities.

Why Java Knights? Well, in the middle ages, a freelancer used to be a knight hired by kings. If you are a freelancer dedicated to Java in Belgium, you should definitely join us. We are a mix of seniors and starters.

History

The Java Knights fellowship started with Just van den Broecke opening the Dutch Java Knights mailing list in 2001. It turned into a real live club when Gerald de Jong of Beautiful Code BV sponsored a mini-conference in Ameland . It was called “Amelot” and everyone there was knighted and given a name with “a lot” on the end (Ger-alot, Just-alot, Sam-alot…).

The Dutch J-Knights are now a thriving community of Java freelancers bringing together some of the greatest Java minds in the Netherlands. They have regular gatherings where they network, eat, drink, program, and discuss tech-stuff. They also share potential contract opportunities and help each other with freelance-related issues.

The elder Dutch Round Table can be joined here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JavaKnights.

In 2010, some of the Belgian guest members decided to start a local chapter. This is when the Belgian Round Table was born.

Subjects and Topics

• Freelancing. All kind of practical things from doing taxes to all other kind of knowledge and experiences.
• Passing around contract offerings. Please note that we don’t accept HR people just looking for profiles.
• Tech-stuff. Many of us are on our own when it comes to the choice of architectures/technology. So we are always on the lookout and exploring “new stuff”, not necessarily Java.
• Home Projects. In many of us develop actual fun/exciting/useful products.
• Gatherings. Different kind of meetings – from having a drink together to joining a JUG session. And yes, free beer for our elder Dutch Round Table Java Knights.
• Q & A. Whether you’re stuck in some programming problem or need opinions on a technology, ask the Knights.
• Having Fun :)

Language

In Belgium we have 3 national languages, 4 regions and a lot of international Freelancers working, so the mailing list language is English.

How To Join the Belgian Chapter?

In order to join us, meet our Round Table at: http://java-knights.be

The Brussels Google Technology User Group organizes a group trip to the DroidCon in London, the 28-29th October 2010. If you are interested to join the fellowship of Android developers, you can find them on their Google group. Tickets have to be reserved in advance, so please don’t wait too long.

http://groups.google.com/group/bru-gtug

http://www.droidcon.co.uk/

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a 501c3 not-for-profit worldwide charitable organization focused on improving the security of application software. Their mission is to make application security visible, so that people and organizations can make informed decisions about true application security risks. Everyone is free to participate in OWASP and all of our materials are available under a free and open software license.

The local Belgium chapter is lead by Sebastien Deleersnyder and their next chapter meeting is on September 21st in Leuven. Participation in OWASP is free and open to all, as are all the materials they produce.

September 21st 2010 18h-20h
Distrinet Research Group (K.U.Leuven).
Department of Computer Science (auditorium 00.225)
Celestijnenlaan 200 A
3001 Heverlee

The agenda:

• 18h00 – 18h30: Welcome & Refreshments
• 18h30 – 18h45: OWASP Update (by Sebastien Deleersnyder, SAIT Zenitel, OWASP Board)
• 18h45 – 19h45: Attacking and Defending the Grid (by Justin Searle)

The Smart Grid brings greater benefits for utilities and customer alike, however these benefits come at a cost from a security perspective. This presentation will explore how the increased functionality and complexity also increases the Smart Grid’s attack surface, or in other words, increases the ways attackers can compromise the Smart Grid’s new infrastructures, systems, and business models. We’ll discuss several specific attack avenues against the Smart Grid and recommendations for mitigating or blocking these attacks.

• 19h45 – 20h00: Break
• 20h00 – 21h00: How I Met Your Girlfriend (by Samy Kampkar)

The discovery and execution of entirely new classes of attacks executed from the Web in order to meet your girlfriend. This includes newly discovered attacks including HTML5 client-side XSS (without XSS hitting the server!), PHP session hijacking and weak random numbers (accurately guessing PHP session cookies), browser protocol confusion (turning a browser into an SMTP server), firewall and NAT penetration via Javascript (turning your router against you), remote iPhone Google Maps hijacking (iPhone penetration combined with HTTP man-in-the-middle), extracting extremely accurate geolocation information from a Web browser (not using IP geolocation), and more.

More info: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Belgium#tab=Chapter_Meetings

Sébastien Stormacq, Build a RESTful Client-Server RIA with JavaFX Technology and Jersey

Date: Thursday, September 9th 2010.

Time: Open as of 18:30, conference start is 19:00. Conference end 22:00.

Place: ULB, FORUM F of the PLAINE campus (see below)

Registration: Required, via JUGEvents

Admission price: None, Free Entry

Seats: 120

Language: English

Agenda:

• 1. 19:00 – Hello World
• 2. Talk (90 min)
• 3. Hand-On Training (80 min) – see note below
• 4. System.exit(0);
• ∞. Third Halftime

After the event, we will certainly find a nice bar near the ULB to have a drink. So please don’t be shy and join the group after the session for a chat.

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Event Sponsor:

Conference Place:

Scientia vincere tenebras
(Conquering darkness with knowledge)

Speaker’s travel and accommodation costs:

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Speaker, Talk & Lab:

Sébastien Stormacq

Sébastien is a Senior Software Architect at Oracle (Sun Microsystems). He uses his 15 years of professional experience to design large scale, secured and highly transactional architectures based on Sun’s middleware solutions. He also speaks at various high level Java conferences, like JavaOne 2009 and 2010, and he is one of the JUG Leaders of the Luxembourg JUG.

Build a RESTful Client-Server Rich Internet Application with JavaFX Technology and Jersey (JSR 310)

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) do require a strong service access and data access layer located on the back-end, just as traditional or web based applications. It is therefore essential to combine desktop technologies and server technologies in order to provide fast, efficient and secure access to your data. This talk will teach how to combine desktop technologies, such as JavaFX technologies, and back-end technologies, like web services and REST based services to build state of the art desktop applications. We will use the following technologies: RESTful web service and JSR 310 (Jersey) API on the server side, JavaFX on the client side. The JavaFX application will asynchronously poll RESTful web services to collect data that will be used to dynamically update the client rich UI.

Hands-On Training

After the 1st halftime, Sébastien proposes a hands-on training. Everyone is invited to bring long a laptop with Netbeans 6.91, Glassfish and JavaFX SDK installed (see wiki). If wished, we can make teams of 2-3 persons. Every team will develop simple application doing JavaFX – REST – Java EE. Sébastien will walk around, help and discuss.

So please don’t forget your laptop, and if you have a multi-outlet power strip at hand, we don’t mind neither :)

Let’s do JavaFX from the zero to hero in one evening :)

More information about the event, the talks and the speakers are available in our Wiki Space.

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Conference Place:

We are invited by the ULB, the Free University of Brussels, to hold our upcoming meet-up on their campus.

The session will be celebrated in the FORUM F of the auditoria of the PLAINE campus. The campus is easy to access by public transport and parking places are available as well.

The address is: Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus de la Plaine, Boulevard du Triomphe, B-1050 Bruxelles

Public transport arriving at or near the campus: buses 71, 72, 95 – trams 23, 24, 25 – Metro, line 1A, station Delta.

Links: Campus map, General access map, Public transport access, Google Map

We hope you passed nice holidays, or (even better) you still are passing nice vacations. As you have noticed, the Brussels JUG enjoys the holiday season as well. However, we didn’t stay inactive (all the time).

The planning for the JUG season 2010/2011 is progressing well and we are proud to announce that we have already recruited a lot of quality speakers for you.

The first session is planned for the 9th September 2010, again at the ULB Campus in Brussels. We are glad to welcome Sébastien Stormacq, experienced Java architect at Oracle/Sun, one of the Luxemburg JUG Leaders and frequent JavaOne speaker. He will show us how to build a RESTful Client-Server RIA with JavaFX Technology and Jersey. A very interesting talk, accompanied with a lot of demo coding.

Please find the list of already confirmed conferences in the sticky post above. Each of the events is worth to pass a congenial evening with other Java enthusiasts :)

As you all know, November is DEVOXX month. We took advantage if this and managed to have two DEVOXX speakers in Brussels for an evening JUG session. We hope to bring a bit of the DEVOXX feeling to all of you that aren’t able to join us there. The day of the conference is not yet defined since we are awaiting the DEVOXX BOF planning, but sure is: it will be exiting and, just in the spirit of the DEVOXX, highly technical.

Concerning the event registration, we switched to the JUGEvents project. Doing the registration there is very handy and you don’t need to have a JUGEvent account. You should just know that the confirmation mail sometimes takes 10 minutes to be received, so don’t panic :) In case of a problem, just drop us a mail.

We are still looking for sponsors, and especially nice and no-too- expensive conference places. If you have an idea, please let us know. Likewise, should you know an interested speaker or if you would like to give a (short) talk yourself, don’t hesitate to contact us. There still is a lot of room in 2011.

We hope you like the event agenda and we see you in September!

Java2Days conference is a brand new event in Eastern Europe to present the latest trends in Java development that will be held for the 2nd time at the Inter Expo Center on 8-9 October in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The conference is the first of its kind to be held in Eastern Europe, focused to highlight today’s cutting edge trends in building software applications with Java development tools. Over two days, more than 600 attendees will meet world famous lecturers, engaged all year round in such events as JavaOne, The ServerSide Symposium, Jazoon, etc.

The major purpose of the event is to become a place for passionate Java developers to get in touch with the latest technologies, to become a significant part of the global Java community and to learn from the best.

As official partner of this event, the Brussels JUG offers 10 free conference passes to our members. Please contact us, if you are interested to join the event!

The agenda is already quite impressive, but the organisers are still looking for more speakers. If you are interested to present a topic (in English), just drop us a message.

Update: Registrations are open:

http://2010.java2days.com/register

This time, the ULB provided us with a nice conference room – 120 seats and a projector – so everybody had much room to feel comfortable :)

Before the session started, John Rizzo pulled some strings and managed to provide refreshments of Belgian style from the Cercle Informatique. The conference officially took-off with John telling us the history of the Black Belt Factory: Once upon a time… Nicolas, present as surprise guest, completed the story with occasional ‘tool tips’. The session ended, much later than initially planned, in an animated discussion about the technologies used to implement the factory (cf. Vaadin}>).

John Rizzo about Java Black Belt (and a bit of Vaadin)

Next on stage: Enterprise Content Management (in the Java World) by Christophe Lombart.

Christophe started the session introducing the general concepts of ECM, presenting goals and risks and giving a brief market overview. Next, Christophe launched the more technical part of his presentation by exposing the different standards. After introducing the Java JCR API, the session ended with a very (inter-)active discussion and a demonstration of the Java JCR API using (and as drive-by the OSGi integration of) Apache Sling.

Christophe Lombart on ECM – 'Everything is Content'

John and Christophe were both very passionate and managed greatly to pass this passion to the public. The result was a familiar ambiance, a lot of questions and much vivid discussions with an audience that proved having already a very high level knowledge of today’s ECM technologies.

In order to conclude to evening in glory, a part of the group continued the business celebrating the 3rd Halftime, enjoying the warm summer night having a beer and a snack.

Geek's are around

A warm summer night, Java and a fresh beer

More:
BruJUG Session Wiki (speaker presentation, more pictures)
BruJUG announcement
Christophe on Twitter, Objectif-Web, Presentation Slides
Black Belt Factory

Java 4-ever
Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0
In 3D at JavaZONE’10

JavaZONE 2010
8-9 Sep 2010
Oslo, Norway

Please find below a copy of the message formulated by Van Riper for the Silicon Valley JUG guys. He explaines very well what Oracles proposes to JUGs for the JavaOne this year: “If you were on the fence about attending JavaOne on September 19-23 this fall, maybe this will help you make up your mind. Oracle has doubled the normal JUG discount from $100 to $200 for this year. That is the good news. The bad news is that you will each need to individually request a personal discount code from Oracle.

If you register before the early bird deadline of July 16th, the registration cost will only be $1395 with the JUG member discount. However, it may take up to two weeks for them to process requests for discount codes. So, you need to submit your discount code request before the end of June in order to get your code in time to register before July 16th.

It is definitely going to be different this year, but, Oracle goes all out for these annual events. So, I don’t think that anyone who signs up will be disappointed. Also, they have what the call User Group Sunday as the first day of the event. Java Champions and JUG Leaders from all over the world will be here that day and we have two rooms for community meetings reserved just for us. I’ll be posting more about that during the weeks leading up to JavaOne.”

If you want to benefit from this offer, you can find more information in our forum (link in the sidebar). Questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us.

On Nov. 13th 2006, Sun announced that Duke would become Free Graphics, just as the implementations of Java ME and SE became Free Software.

What does “Open Source Duke” mean? It means all you Duke fans have the original mascot for Java technology to play with. With your creative designs, you can give Duke a personal touch. See how Duke fares trying new pastimes such as hiking, base-jumping, skiing, Sudoku, or scuba-diving – or get Duke nationalized by adding your favorite flag.

Duke was originally created Joe Palrang to be the “agent” for the Green Project at Sun. Duke became the Java mascot when Java technology was first announced, right around the same time that the first Java cup logo was commissioned.

More information about the history of Duke can be found on the official Duke project page:  http://kenai.com/projects/duke/pages/Home. A lot of different Duke bitmap pictures and vector drawings are available at http://duke.kenai.com.

Unfortunately, there are no handy 3D models for FOSS applications available on the project site, so we decided to convert them into a format that was easier to use. We choose Art Of Illusion as renderer and, as the original files, the AoI meshes are free to use (BSD license, see Duke project page).

So here are 3 different AoI Scenes that you can use as base for new creations:

The base Duke Duke waving The Duchess (see jDuchess.org :-)

Quick start: Install AoI, open one of the files, CTRL+R, Enter, enjoy your first picture :)

The Duke mesh coloring is realized via the “body_mapping” (Procedural 3D) texture. The mesh and the texture are linked using three Texture Parameters (‘white’, ‘red’, ‘black’ – default). When you remove the texture from the mesh, the parameter values are reset within the mesh object. By this, when you re-select the same texture, all values are 0 and the Duke appears in black. In this case, you need to re-select points and attribute the respective color by setting one of the parameters to 1.

Some images we did for the Brussels JUG: Logo 1, Logo 2, Animated Logo (on YouTube).

We hope you enjoy playing around with the models and don’t forget to drop us a message to show us your best creations! :-)

Currently, we’ve engaged in a friendly discussion with Max Bonbhel, Congo JUG Leader and the current JUG-AFRICA President. Max and his team organize the JCertif 2010, the major JAVA event for the Central Africa IT community.

JCertif 2010 will be one of the first conferences in the Central Africa to teach developers the Java programming and the basics of developing for mobile platforms. Speakers will include many of the local and world’s renowned experts – both developers of the technology, and applications and systems users.

The event will be held from 26th to 29th of August, in Brazzaville, République du Congo!

The JCertif team is currently looking for speakers.

If you are interested to present a subject to the Java community during an event other than the “classic” ones, this is the place to be! If you feel like living a bit of an adventure, get acquainted with a different culture and meet great people like Max Bonbhel and Ahmed Hashim, Java Champion and Egypt JUG leader, then this is for you!

Ready to go? Send us an e-mail and we will forward you to the right people…

And yes, all Brussels JUG members are kindly invited as guests as well!

Links:
Congo JUG: http://www.congojug.com/
JUG-AFRICA: https://jug-africa.dev.java.net/
JCertif 2010: http://www.jcertif.com