Meetings

Year 1997

Month
Topic
November Performance Profiling for Java Applications 

The performance of Java applications is dependent on three items: the raw processing power of the Java Virtual Machine; the implementation of Java Beans, and the AWT toolkit and other Java API's; and of course your application's code using those services. 

To tune algorithms, you must understand each piece in order to affect overall application performance. Improvements to the raw processing power of the VM, the garbage collector and class loader can't remove fundamental bottlenecks in your application's code. To eliminate those bottlenecks you often have to change your own algorithms and data structures as well as how ou use system services to reduce their cost. 

The talk will relate performance profiling accuracy to Visual Quantify, an application performance profiling tool that automatically pin points performance bottlenecks in Java applications. For more information about Visual Quantify, see http://www.rational.com/products/quantify To download an evaluation version of Visual Quantify, go to: http://www2.rational.com/cgi/webval_devtools/

The presenter will be Jon Sanders, Development Engineering Manager for Rational Software Corporation's Developer Tools Group.

August Robert Denny of O'Reilly and Associates presented to the group. Robert is the main developer at O'Reilly and Associates. He has been working on WebSite Professional 2.0 and will be talking about it and Java. We were shown how to use O'Reilly's implementation of Server Side Java. The newest version supports it much better than the previous version (mainly because the JVM and Garbage collector are sTABLE now). In the 2.0 release there will be support for Sun's Servlet technology - hopefully within 90 days of the release.
July For July we will traveled to South San Jose. IBM has a research facility on top of the mountain there. 

We will be heared about two technologies that IBM has been working on. Grand Central Station and QBIC. These two technologies were very cool and the presentations were great! 

Grand Central Station is written in Java and most of the info is not public yet as it is still under development. For QBIC they have developed a Java front end to QBIC which Jim Hafner will discuss. 

The central focus of Grand Central Station (GCS) is serving useful information from the cyberspace to individual users no matter where the information resides and wherever the users are. The GCS information discovery infrastructure tracks, crawls and summarizes a diverse set of common data sources. Leveraging from and extending the webcasting technology, the GCS information dissemination architecture automatically delivers information through personalized web channels to desktop clients, receiving applications/appliances, and mobile porTABLE platforms such as PDAs. 

QBIC - is Query By Image Content. More information about this technology can be found at: http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com/~qbic/qbic.html

June We were given a demonstration of Sun's Network Computer and Insignia Solutions NTRIGUE product. Both demonstrations were great. 

I would really like to thank Tom Arkwright at Sun for orchestrating this for us. It was a great evening - he did an awsome job! 

7:00 Presentation of Sun's JavaStation
7:30 Insignia Solutions' NTRIGUE
8:00 Questions and Answers 
8:15 Hands on time with the JavaStations. We will have some JavaStations setup for us to test drive.

May We had a JavaBeans expert, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart. Eduardo gave a great presentation on JavaBeans. 

Eduardo received his BS & MSc. from USB, in Venezuela, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been at Sun since 1990 working first in DevPro, then in the Spring group, and, most recently in JavaSoft. While at JavaSoft, Eduardo contributed to JavaIDL, lead the JavaRMI alpha1 team, and has been working on JavaBeans since its inception. Eduardo's current focus is the BDK, the Beans Development Kit. 

April We had a Sneak Preview of PowerJ and Discussion about JavaOne. PowerJ is the first tool I have seen that has support for both JDK 1.02 and JDK 1.1. Those who attended got a copy of a CD that had this product in Beta form. The database access seemed a little rough around the edges but considering the source of the product I have little doubt that this will get cleaned up greatly. 

FREE ADMISSION AND SOFTWARE GIVEAWAYS! 
Powersoft and the Silicon Valley Java User Group would like to invite you to a sneak preview of PowerJ. 

Leveraging features of the award-winning Powersoft Optima+++, PowerJ provides a highly productive, component-based development environment with scalable database connectivity and simplified server-side development. And non-Java elements like HTML and JavaScript are easily integrated, simplifying the editing, publishing, and debugging process for all aspects of your Web applications. 

If you're ready to start building powerful Internet and intranet applications but need an approachable tool that offers a comprehensive business solution, check out this exciting presentation on PowerJ. And experience RAD Java+for the real world. 

To learn more about PowerJ, join the PowerJ Early Access Program and download the FREE pre-release trial version from the Powersoft Web site: www.powersoft.com.

March Borland demonstrated C++ Builder at a combined meeting of the Java group and the C++ group. Do to issues outside the control of the presenters, JBuilder was not able to be demonstrated. The Demonstration was given by Charlie Calvert of Borland. It was a very powerful demonstartion with their ability to connect to a database and several other features being highlighted. 

The meeting was held at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara. The meeting was Sponsored By Hall Kinion and Soft Plus

February Symantec demonstrated Visual Cafe and Visual Cafe Pro. As usual the demonstration was great. The folks at Symantec have pulled together a great product and are creating alliances with many companies in the I*net market place. The conversation during the meeting focused on the abilities of the product and the short comings too. The most noTABLE short coming was in the are of documentation. If you have not seen a demo, you most likely would not know how to use the tool. Don't despare, documentation is being written currently and should be available soon. 

Door Prizes - we had too many. Each person in the audience got some prize or another. One lucky person won the pass to JavaOne.

January Refereshments were be provided by Hall Kinion - Internet Division. 

The evening started with Gene Paymar demonstrating "The Core Java Libraries" CD from MindQ. 

Object design presented their product. Object Design's PSE product (a lightweight Java persistence layer) is being bundled with Netscape Communicator, Microsoft's JDK, Borland's Latte and Asymetrix 's Supercede. It's suiTABLE for small application development and applet development where data needs to be stored on the client side. PSE is also API compatiable with our full featured ObjectStore Java Interface (OSJI) product which builds on our 6 year old object database technology to form the foundation of a distributed computing environment. 

http://www.odi.com