Tonight I attended my first Java User Group meeting in Toronto. It seemed like there were nearly 100 developers there, and I made my grand entrance 15-20 minutes into the presentation :) I didn't know how much time it would take me to get there so I tried to give myself 2 hours. Unfortunately I was a bit late and had 1hr 45 minutes. With the stop and go traffic all the way down 401 and DVP, plus having to drive great distances to the center of the city to get there, buy parking from a meter that didn't seem to work, find the right entrance and room etc... oh well, nobody seemed to care.
The guy behind me looked so much like James Gosling (original creator of Java) I thought it really was him until I looked again. Everyone in there seemed to be older than me. The presenter was from Gigaspaces, a grid computing company. Their product looks really neat, but it also seems like you can't really make use of it without spending lots of $$$ on consulting hours to get going. I got the impression you write your app, then pay their consultants to help gridify it. When done properly the results are unbelievable, both in performance and reliability.
At the end most people packed up and left. A few stuck around to ask questions. I was a bit surprised, but didn't really know what to expect from the first meeting. The Barrie 2600 meetings and probably the Barrie Linux Group are more of a social event. The JUG seems more formal, where every month they have a professional speaker from some vendor there to hype you about their products. This may seem bad to some people, but I think I'm ok with it. That kind of exposure to a variety of products and architecture is important to a career programmer.
I'm sure after a few meetings, if I talk to some people I'll make some new Java guru friends.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
