Meetings

Year 1996

Month
Topic
December Asymetrix demonstrated their Superceed product. This is a very cool developement environment for Java. It compiles to native windows code and has byte code. It has a very cool debugging environment that allows you to change the values of variables, evaluate variables and run code snippets. Check it out.
November John Slater presented a drawing program he has been working on. The source for the program will be available here after December 10 

I showed a utility I have written to access a database through a web browser. This tool uses Symantec's dbAnywhere and JDBC for the front end. The source for this too will be available after December 10 

Additionally, we discussed some debuging tips and techniques. 
 

October During the announcements a representative from Hall Kinion introduced herself. They are looking for skilled people and signed a few people up after the meeting ended. 

Brian King will gave us a presentation on using server-side java for developing web sites. Brian showed the group how to use Jeeves. Jeeves is a webserver written to support Java. It allows the user to create CGI scripts that are Java Programs. It was a very good presentation. 

I gave in improtu demonstration of Visual Cafe pre-release 2. It has come along way from pre-release 1. I demo'd how easy it is to create a simple program without writing any code. 
 

September Greg Turner presented an explanation on JDBC, ODBC, complete with examples and source code. 

This was followed by a presentation of Java Workshop. Check out SunSoft's site for more information about their developement product. 
 

August Brian King explained Exception handling in Java. It was very informative and we look forward to more presentations from Brian. 

I demonstrated a custom component I wrote, a spinner component. I showed but did not cover how the CGI piece worked. This will all be available when the program I am working on is completed. 
 

July We had Symantec preview their new Visual Java RAD tool. 

We also enlisted several magazine publishers to send free copies of their magazines to give to our users. 

Symantec's demonstration ran a little long. Therefore Brian King's tutorial on Exception handling in Java has been pushed out to the August meeting. 
 

June I showed an application that I am working on. This application uses the card layout manager and the gridbag layout manager. Also included in this application is a static debuging class. I went through all three of these and answered questions about them. 

Buddy had extra handouts from JavaOne that he handed out. One of them was from the discusion that covered the layout managers (very nice). 

We demonstrated a CD ROM that we later raffled off. The CDROM was an online book. it is entry level and multimedia. Look for a review of the CDROM on these pages soon. 

From there we went over to the JavaSoft web site to read the open letter to the internet community by Alan Baritz. It was an open appology and explanation of their actions to keep the Java(tm) name theirs. They had sent letters to anyone with the four letters 'java' in their domain name. There was one in particular that they offended. We also found the Notes from the (a HREF="http://www.javasoft.com/java.sun.com/javaone/index.html">JavaOne conference. 

May Aimtech showed us a their new Java Development tool - Jamba. Jamba is a new Java authoring tool that allows webmasters and Internet developers to create Java applets and applications without programming or scripting. Adding multimedia and interactivity to a website and delivering those capabilities via Java has never been this easy. Jamba can also be extended as Java programmers can add their own classes. Jim Arsenault, Aimtech's Director of Engineering, demonstrated the product, showed some examples, and answered questions. The general discusion was informative. We Jim told us about some of the hurdles they overcame in developing the product. The one most remembered by me was that you can't trust the garbage collector to do everything for you. Objects that use system resources need you to take a more active roll. You need to call dispose() for these objects to release the resources. 

Brian King demonstrated some of his Java work. Brian is creating a class to train the other programmers where he works on Java. Brian's tutorial was truly worth seeing. He has written some code to dynamically create components and add them to a gridbag layout. In his tutorial we learned how to create objects on the fly. Hats off to Brian - it was a very useful session for all who attended. Look to his web site for more information. 
 

April This meeting we demonstrated some code that we have been working on to test how easy it is to use Java to communicate to a server. The applet communicated to our server and responded back with data we had requested. The data was then parsed and displayed in a scrollable text window.

Steve Schuettler - demonstrated a Client/Server project he has been working on written in Java. The Client front end was demonstrated and worked very cleanly. His applets communicate back to a server that is running a Java Application. The Server side is interfacing to native code that is getting data via ODBC. Check out his web page at http://www.bmobile.com

Chris Mason - demonstrated a Pong Java applet

 

March The March meeting was a tremendous success. Peter Van Der Linden presented to the group. We were given some history of the Internet. Peter covered how the Java programming language is ideal for the Internet. It was a very informative meeting. Our Thanks to Peter.
February The February meeting was our inaugural meeting. We had a room full of people, it was a tremendous turnout.

Roger Bowman of Symantec demonstrated their Cafe product. Cafe appears to be a very usefull development tool. Roger answered many questions about the product and the Java Language. Cafe is an integrated developement environment. There will be a complete review of the product here and in the Silicon Valley Journal. We handed out a survey at the meeting. It helped to determine that most of the people would like to see introductory Java code.