Liverpool UK JUG

October meeting writeup

Update 10 Nov: Susanne sent some excellent digital photos at the end of November, but I've only had chance to update now... (see below) Update 24 Oct: Added photos. (Not very good ones, as the light wasn't really good enough for the camera on my P800)

We've had some very positive feedback already about yesterday's event... but first, thanks to

• Our speakers, Alastair Armstrong from LIBeLIS.com and Martin de Jode from symbian.com, who were so generous with their time and experience to support our new group!
• My company, Unilever, who provided a data projector.
• and everyone who turned up to make it an event...

The audience was a nice mix of students (postgrad and undergrad), professionals developers (J2ME development, content management, digital media) and hobbyists.

Java Data Objects

Alastair's talk on JDO was well received though the audience for the most part hadn't had any experience with it: apparently it's a very mainstream technology in mainland Europe, but less popular in UK. Essentially, it's a way of writing classes (in standard Java code) that allow you to do something as simple as

employee.setName("John Smith");
employee.setSalary(20000);
employee.giveBonus();

and with a minimum of boilerplate (database setup, and transaction management) have this automagically transformed into database code without having to write a single SQL statement. This is very cool, and though I'd have assumed that the extra abstraction would slow things down, because all the database code can be optimized and cached at the JDO level, apparently some queries can in fact be up to 20% faster (though I'd like to see the figures ;->).

More information on JDO at JDOcentral.com

Symbian and Java

Martin's talk was very topical as about half the audience was familiar with J2ME including the developers of the CrazyWarp application, and J2ME games developers/trainers. We discussed Java on mobile phones and why the Symbian Operating System considers it to be a complement instead of a threat. The irritations of working with a stripped down Java like MIDP 1.0 (and the joys - apparently it is much easier to teach! And it's very improving to get back to basics and develop your own Floating Point library...)

There are still a lot of APIs on the phone that aren't accessible to Java (SMS, Camera, Vibrator...) or which you can only just about use with the Java Native Interface. But the situation is improving, and developing for mobile phones with Java is very exciting right now. Update 10 Nov: Martin sent some clarifications:

Although MIDP (1.0 or 2.0) doesn't provide access to SMS or the camera itself, the optional Wireless Messaging API provides a MIDlet with SMS capabilities and the optional Mobile Media API provides a MIDlet with the ability to take snapshots using the onboard camera.

Both these APIs are part of the Java Technology for the Wireless Industry specification and as such will be available on an increasing amount of MIDP phones (and of course are available on the latest Symbian OS phone, the Nokia 6600).

Afterwards...

By great good fortune, the last planned round of drinks was cancelled due to last orders... but headache aside, it was a great evening. Got to have some great conversations with some very interesting people. We're very keen to showcase the 'members' of LJUG, their companies and projects on this site, to show the extent of what's going on in Java in the NorthWest, so look out for some more postings soon!

Free books!

We've been accepted into SAMS Publishing's User Group program, and they kindly sent an enormous pile of books and other goodies a few days before the meeting. We've already had people borrow these books:

• Teach Yourself Java in 21 days
• XQuery
• Java APIs for XML

and we're hoping to get some reviews of these for this website. If you'd like to borrow a book, please get in touch with us (we'll post the complete list soon), or if you've already reviewed any Java book, send it to us and we'll post it here.

SAMS are also offering a 30% discount on their Teach Yourself x in 21 days series, give us a shout if you'd like one of the vouchers!

Posted by osfameron at October 23, 2003 01:41 PM | TrackBack