Hello, OrlandoJUG!

We had a great meeting last week. Didn't come? You missed out on a great talk about Java Server Faces and Servlet by Ed Burns, but the good thing is his books are easy to find and he's local.

In fact, his presentations were the ones he gave recently at JavaOne and here's a video of him with someone you all probably either have heard of or recognise: Steve Chin on Java at Nighthacking. Heather VanCura flew in from the East Bay (Oracle, SF) and gave us 2 things: an overview of how the Java Community Process works and an invitation for us, the OrlandoJUG to be a part of it. How? We need an ambassador to step up to the plate and help organize. Then, we'll have a direct hand in shaping the future of Java. Let me know who wants to be first to be involved. It'll be interesting to see how the involvement trickles down, if you know what I mean. 

Thanks to Heather and Ed, and Lamine and Mamadou and the gang at Senejug, we managed to pull off our first live Google Hangout. 

How do you like the Meetup page? It's up for renewal 2/11 and I am thinking it's 1) a good thing - we got 120 or so members, most of which are new and 2) it's pulling people in here to Codetown so we can have better discussion forums, which is the point, isn't it. 

We met at the new, shiny DeVry campus. Thanks, DeVry - you always come through for us. Over 10 years now, DeVry has been a mainstay for OJUG. While every other place is like a swinging door and has trouble recognising that OJUG is supported by sponsors and has very little in the way of budget, DeVry just asks that we turn the lights off when we leave. 

It was a very informative and fun meeting...and the pizza was HOT! We didn't let the rain stop us, did we? 

Stay tuned for some very exciting OJUG news for February...I think we'll have Jackie Gleason here to give a talk on Angular, NoSQL, Neo4J and more...keep your fingers crossed!