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
—–
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