Dublin JUG June Meetup Synopsis

So you wanted to know what exactly gets covered at the Dublin JUG
meetups? Here's a quick, edited stream of collective consciousness from
last night:

JBoss guys doing talk in London – Mark Proctor, JBoss Rules.
Sun Microsystems HQ might be an idea for presentations.

Topics that might be covered in a Rules, JBoss, Hibernate, Spring.
.Net guys use Boswell's hotel for conferences. 60-100 ppl
Pascal from DCU about .Net group
Barcamp use old Guinness visitor centre for conference area.

Perl industrial duct tape – is there still a market for it as the
primary job skill?
Python more popular than Ruby according to job boards
OpenApp use Python, demo graphics similar to Google Maps
Might be an idea to get some Python guys to bring people over to the
dark side.
Ruby group getting started.
Groovy scripting
Paul likes PHP because it's easy to read, update and there's lots of
stuff out in the wild

Juan getting tired of Java since you can't use any of the new stuff,
since all of the environments use 1.4
Retroweaver comes with Struts 2.0, modifies 1.5 byte code so it runs in
1.4 JVM
It is being used in production
Irish independent using 1.5
Sun don't put in must-have features, drop support to make people upgrade
If companies did bigger changes at the same time, perhaps there would be
more impetus to upgrade.

Application servers drive change
Consumers using the applets will only need a subset of the API. Is this
the way to go for servers?
OSGI, JSR-277
Ecosystem of Jars
Java 6 is irrelevant to everyday developers, since most are stuck on
older JVMs

Google's biggest problem when they upgraded to Java 5 was rewriting
enum() functions, due to reserved word
A talk with Li Moore is available on the Sun website –

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/google/limoore.html

You can run Google mail through your website
Personal mail proxy
Will mobiles/3G cards make corporate email policies obsolete?

Java.sun.com worldviewer – realtime written by NASA
Aircoach has maps which show where the next bus is
Dart has same but not in realtime
Tomtom does similar

Shrink wrapped software versus web app quality