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 “About” pages. Curious to see how a BruJUG session looks like? Check out our past sessions or take a look at our Photo page.

All upcoming Season 2011/2012 Events are in our wiki. All speaks are hold in English and entry is free for anyone. Registration via JUGEvents (no account needed for this).

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Upcoming Events:

Fri 29.06.2012 – Uberto Barbini – Boost your Object-Orientated-Programming with Functional Programming

The user group for Play! framework enthusiasts living and working in Belgium has its first meeting the 6th of June 2012 in Brussels.

Tag line: “We don’t focus on Scala or Java, Play 1.x or 2.x, the key is Play, and not a subset of it. Come and have a talk over a good pint of Belgian beer!”

Want to know more? Click this: http://www.meetup.com/play-be/

Calling all hackers, coders, programmers, developers, designers, thing tanks, brain stormers of all shapes and sizes! Spend a weekend with us and change the world!

The 2nd RHoK Hackathon Belgium event happens on 2-3 June 2012, in Kontich, near Antwerp, Gent and Brussels.

The mission of the global RHoK movement is to make the world a better place through a global community of innovation developing practical open technology. Hacking for Humanity, so to speak. RHoK is unique in the space of “apps competitions”, “hackathons” and “technology for social good”. RHoK’s model is to start from identifying, defining and refining problem definitions provided by subject matter experts and local stakeholders. This ensures that volunteer time is focused on solving real problems for real people.

This will be the 5th event in general, happening at the same time in 35 cities around the world, live streamed and … great fun!

The event is free. Food and net access will be provided. Great fun is promised, prices for the best applications are foreseen and sleeping is possible on place. Everything the hacker’s heart requires is prepared – missing part: YOU!

We would like to introduce the Hackathon with some shorts talk sessions and maybe one of you would like to join us for a discussion panel or a talk?

We are also looking for “local problem definitions”, so if you have some inspiration what could be done, please let us know.

More info on the Belgium event page: http://rhok.be and the global event page: http://rhok.org, or just Google around.

Impressions from the last event in Belgium (video and pics): http://www.rhok.be/media/

CU!

It’s that time of year again that we ask Java communities worldwide to tell us which people, companies and technologies they believe are having the biggest impact in the Java ecosystem.

The JAX Innovation Awards was a great success last year and we’re looking to reward excellence and innovation again this year.  And it’s through the nominations of everyone in the ecosystem that the process gets started.

There are 3 categories to make nominations in:

• Most Innovative Java Technology
• Most Innovative Java Company
• Top Java Ambassador

Go to http://jax-awards.com to nominate right now!

This award program is all about the Java community; YOU nominate in the 3 categories, a panel of industry stars whittles down the nominations into a shortlist, and then YOU vote on the shortlist to
decide the overall winners. The winner of each category receives $2,500.

Nominations close on May 7th 2012. http://jax-awards.com

If you have any questions please contact Anna Kent at annak <ÄT> sandsmedia <DÖT> com.

Update: Video of the session is online: https://vimeo.com/41214504
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After a longer pause, we are back with a very cool session:  “Restructuring: Improving the modularity of an existing code-base”.

Chris Chedgey, founder of Structure101 and based in England, flights over to test the hospitality of Belgian Juggies. He is welcome!

Here’s the pitch:

“When a code-base reaches a certain age, it starts to creak, grind, rot. It seems like everything uses everything. Developers do not understand the big picture and start duplicating or creating parallel worlds of design, making things even worse. Architects are uneasy and sleep badly. Managers notice how long it takes to get new features into the product, and to get the bugs out of incremental releases, and they make sure nobody sleeps well. Now is the time for the code-base to be restructured, or die a painful death.

This talk covers the most common structural problems, gives strategies for fixing them with minimal impact to the logical design, and shows how this reduces coupling and complexity, improves modularity, and can be used to establish an architecture that the whole team understands and that helps the developers as they edit the code. In other words, how to stop the rot, and keep it stopped.

The principles and strategies will be illustrated by examples.”

When: Thu, April 26 2012, starting 18:30.
Where: Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Stormstraat 2 / 2, Rue d’Assaut, ROOM 4118
Entry fee: free session.

Why: because it’s interesting, cool and you will meet a lot of other cool Java people.

Give-aways: Licenses for Structure 101 and Re-Structure 101, maybe more? :)

Aftermath: No English gentleman comes to Belgium without tasting our beer collection. Questions? :-)

More info and registration: http://wiki.brussels-jug.be/doku.php?id=events2:2012_01_session1

As usual, free hugs go to our sponsors that make this fun possible: TRASYS Group, Oracle, Structure 101, CTS and Mega Banner.

Hope to see many of you!

The theme for the 2012 Java Specialists Symposium is: Iced Tea in Crete – How libre software makes Java successful.

The conference starts on the 10th and ends on the 13th of September 2012, with an optional day on the 14th for those who would like to get together even more informally and code.

Sessions will run from 8:30 until 12:30 every morning. After that the attendees will be free to go on interesting excursions or carry on chatting to fellow Java programmers.

This conference is free. Of course you need to pay your own travel costs.

More information:

http://www.javaspecialists.eu/wiki/index.php/JavaSpecialistsSymposium2012

http://jnkjava.blogspot.com/2011/09/java-open-spaces-conference-2011-in.html

Together with the BeJUG team, we organise our 2nd session about the subject “Programming For Kids” – Code name: DEVOXX4Kids :)

Everybody interested in this subject is invited.

Pictures and videos from our first session: http://bejug.org/confluenceBeJUG/display/BeJUG/Programming+for+Kids

Infos concerning our next session: http://www.bejug.org/confluenceBeJUG/display/BeJUG/Devoxx4Kids+Meeting

Some of you asked about the “Adopt A JSR” program that Martijn mentioned at the end of the session. Please have a look at the link below. Please know that we fancy to build and support an “Adopt A JSR” working group with you, providing that enough interested people show up.

http://java.net/projects/jugs/pages/AdoptAJSR

Moreover, we uploaded the session as video. It’s release under the “Creative Common NonCommercial ShareAlike NoDerivates” licence and you can download the HD videos for offline watching, if you like.

Tim Peeters, colleague from the BeJUG, represented Belgium at Oracle’s IOUC User Group Leader’s Summit in the US.

Of course, he did it well by defending our reputation concerning driving behavi#@… skills and won the JUG Leader Cart race ;-)

He wrote a very nice report, including pictures of course… have a look!

http://www.bejug.org/confluenceBeJUG/display/BeJUG/….

GeeCON (http://geecon.org) is a conference focused on Java and Java Virtual Machine based technologies, with special attention to dynamic languages like Groovy, Ruby and Javascript.

GeeCON 2012 will be held in Poznan (Poland) on 17-18th of May 2012. Our speakers list at the moment includes some interesting names: Bruce Eckel, Adam Bien, Kevlin Henney, Dierk König, Pete Muir, Simon Willnauer, Martijn Verburg, Patrycja Wegrzynowicz, Dawid Weiss.

Apart from invited talks we would like announce GeeCON 2012 call for papers. It will be open between 7th of January and will last till 12th of February 2012.

We are interested in hosting lectures related to:

• best practices and solutions that solve real problems
• enterprise architecture patterns
• domain specific languages
• cloud computing
• languages on the JVM (Groovy, JRuby, Scala, Clojure, JavaScript, …)
• mobile computing (Android, Java ME)
• JVM performance tuning
• software quality (refactoring, static code analysis, automated tests,
• mutational test verification
• software configuration management
• agile methodologies
• rich internet applications (HTML5, Flex, JavaFX)

Submission should include short abstract of a talk proposal and bio of the speaker. Take a look at: http://2012.geecon.org/c4p for details regarding submission.

In terms of any questions feel free to contact us at: call-for-papers[*]geecon.org

You are kindly invited to the next OWASP Belgium chapter meeting on March 6 in Leuven. This event is co-organized with SecAppDev 2012.

The agenda:
•    18h00 – 18h45: Welcome & Pizzas
•    18h45 – 19h00: OWASP Update (by S.Deleersnyder, SAIT Zenitel, OWASP Board)
•    19h00 – 20h00: Common iOS Pitfalls vs. OWASP’s iGoat (by Ken van Wyk, KRvW Associates)
•    20h00 – 20h15: Break
•    20h15 – 21h15: Access Control Design Best Practices (by J.Manico, WhiteHat Security)

Hosted by Distrinet Research Group (KU Leuven). Co-organized with SecAppDev 2012.

More information can be found at https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Belgium#Chapter_Meetings.

In the context of the Global Android Dev Camp 2012, a hackathon that already 50 Android developer groups worldwide joined so far, the Brussels GTUG under the lead of Friedger Müffke, organises the Belgian edition of the event. Novice and advanced developers are welcome.

• Saturday 10:00: Presentation of project ideas
• Coding and listening to livestreams from other user groups
• Sunday 18:00: Presentation of results, prizes and start of public voting

http://android-dev-camp-2012.blogspot.com/

http://brussels.gtugs.org/

Think global. Hack local. 48 hours straight. Enjoy!