Java is a language in evolution. There are a handful of language changes in Java 9 and 10 plus several JDK changes in 9, 10, 11, and 12. Some of these changes are significant in that they allow us to do things more effectively than before. The difference can be anywhere from reducing code to avoiding errors that come from verbosity. In this presentation we will explore the language changes first. Then we will visit the additions to the JDK. Along the way we will also look at a few things that have been removed from Java as well.

You’ve probably heard of MicroProfile, but how do you go from buzz to production? In this code-heavy, interactive presentation, we’ll describe how to use OpenTracing (http://opentracing.io/) with Jaeger (https://www.jaegertracing.io/)  and annotations in MicroProfile and other Microservice architectures to reliably improve and deploy updated versions your applications to OpenShift and Kubernetes in the cloud.  Topics include best practices for performance analysis, maintaining delivery pipelines using the Linux command line, plus tips on the best free OpenTracing tools and SDKs available on GitHub.

 

NOTE: This meeting is NOT on our normal "second-Thursday" schedule.

 

The popularity of Amazon's Alexa and Google Home has been inspiring both developers and businesses to think about Voice computing. From a banking assistant on your phone to grocery shopping on your TV - it is truly exciting to see how Voice Interfaces could be used. The challenge, however, is that most Voice Apps are fairly limited in what they can do.

In this talk, Vineet shares experiences from prototyping and building over a dozen Voice Apps. He shows how practical decisions can make implementing great apps easy, reviews existing tools that have been built and talks about Violet (http://helloviolet.ai/) an Open-Source Voice App Framework designed to help developers create Voice Apps. Violet uses an approach inspired by Angular and React to simplify the complexity needed when manually building using other lower-level frameworks, while providing for more flexibility than the drag-and-drop non-technical tools on the market.

Learning a new programming language doesn’t have to be hard. Sure, there’s a lot of new stuff to wrap your head around: syntax, keywords and symbols, conventions, how to define variables and methods, arrays, and the list go on and on! But what if there were a technique and toolkit you could use to master a new language fast?

In this session, Richard Kasperowski introduces mob programming and code koans. Mobbing is about getting all the best minds working on the same computer at the same time. Code koans are a series of micro-puzzles that teach you the new language in little chunks, using test-driven development. We’ll mob together on a set of code koans to learn a new language. Even better, we’ll decide on the language together! Current choices include C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby.

Who should attend? Anyone who wants to learn about mob programming and how to learn a new language.

 

We would like to thank our event host Chewy.com for all the support for making this event possible in Downtown Boston. 

The venue will open at 5:30 PM for networking, so come early and meet everyone else.  Pizza, drinks (including beer!)  sponsored by Chewy --- there will be some Gluten free pizza as well. There will be a 15 minutes Lighting Talk at 6:00 by Marco Ferrer, Software Engineer at Chewy.

If you have any questions, feel free contact Mahesh Acharya (Nejug Event Coordinator) at 617 767 Three One Seven One.

We would like to thank the following volunteers:

Photography: George Yazbeck

Videography:  Francis Solis Olivares

 

 

Resilient architecture is crucial for all cloud implementations. In this talk, we explore different design patterns to make a distributed application more resilient. 

As part of this journey, for any process, we need to ask what if something goes wrong? Then, plan a course of action to the process auto heal without any human intervention and how to lower risks by performing canary deployments. Design starts with at first understanding of requirements and performing empathy map and value chain analysis. 

Thinking application as stateless for all the API calls makes the system available most of the time requires creating a cache for common distributed data. Next, we examine how to deal with cascading failures, and timeouts scenarios.  Applications, as part of auto-healing, need to Detect, Prevent, Recover, Mitigate, Complement so that the service is resilient. 

Key takeaways for the audience are as follows:

• Resiliency is essential for any feature in cloud
• Understanding the value chain is critical to identify failure points
• Challenges come in identifying if there is a failure and design the system for auto healing
• Focus should be first to prevent a failure to occur. 
• Identifying key challenges in your company and tools and techniques to auto-heal and provide a sustainable solution

Have you ever wanted to deploy hundreds if not thousands of virtual servers with the single click of a button. Who hasn't? With a little JSON and the utility Terraform by HashiCorp, this power can be yours. 

By deploying your infrastructure as a service, you can not only keep track of what resources are where, but also easily adjust or deploy additional resources without the need for navigating cumbersome user interfaces.

Java Modules are the future. However, our enterprise applications have legacy code, a lots of it. How in the world do we migrate from the old to the new? What are the primary challenges?

In this presentation we will start with an introduction to modules and learn how to create them. Then we will dive into the differences between unnamed modules, automatic modules, and explicit modules. After that we will discuss some key limitations of modules, things that may surprise your developers if they're not aware of. Finally we will discuss how to migrate current applications to use modules.

The NEJUG Holiday Party is scheduled for our normal "second Thursday" in December, but it is not a normal presentation meeting. Instead, it's an "all fun time" event where we get to chat, eat, drink, and socialize. Come, join us for dinner, great conversation and raffle prizes. Buy your tickets now and get the early bird discount!

CLICK HERE 🡆  NEJUG Holiday Party Tickets (at EventBrite)

Menu items include:

• Rolls

• Salad
• Appetizers
• Chicken Parma
• Four Cheese Ravioli
• Rigatoni, Broccoli & Chicken
• Dessert
• Soft drinks, tea, and coffee are included.
• Cash bar also available.
• NO PIZZA - That's for regular meetings...

 

Space is limited to 50 guests so buy your tickets early! Tickets for yourself and your guests are available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nejug-holiday-2018-tickets-51209185051

There will be a Raffle drawing and you have a chance to win a Gift Card -- Thanks to our sponsor Attivio

 

Corporate Sponsors:

We are looking for additional corporate sponsors to help maximize the fun! Contact Avi Neer <avineer@gmail.com> if you have a sponsor idea or contact for monetary support, raffles items, or door prizzes.

 

Thanks to our primary Holiday Party sponsor:

	John Galt contributes to the success of organizations and individuals throughout the United States by expertly matching them with one another. Founded in 1997, they have worked with thousands of organizations and individuals over the years to enable them to achieve success. Their focus is on contract technology professionals in disciplines which are critical to an organization’s success.
Raffle Gift Card Sponsor:
	Attivio is an intelligent answers and insights platform that brings intuitive search experiences to businesses. In doing so, we help mid-to-large sized companies solve their most complex search needs/projects, such as customer support, risk avoidance, and digital transformation. To do this, we leverage our own natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to provide a personalized and accurate search experience that delivers actionable answers to every question, instead of a simple list of links.

 

While "DevOps" is a very overrated and misused marketing term, we have many DevOps stories from around the world proving that shared responsibility between Dev and Ops can work out really well.

A key component of DevOps is open communication and feedback loops. Monitoring data is one source of these feedback loops. Too often, however, this is only done in Operations for firefighting and root cause analysis. Kevin will discuss approaches of Shifting-Left Performance into the Continuous Delivery Pipeline to give earlier and faster performance, scalability and architectural feedback to developers, testers, architects and business.

The presentation will include some hands-on experience on how to bake monitoring into DevOps tool chains such as JIRA, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Git, HipChat, JMeter, … - there should be something for everyone who wants to learn some new tips & tricks on how to become more “DevOps’y”

Check out the Prezzi that Jonathan made for this presentation

https://prezi.com/view/awP8F1N9QDV3vRCEAYCY/

 

Kubernetes out of the box is a strong platform for running and coordinating large collections of services, containers, and applications. As is, Kubernetes is powerful for many solutions.

Remember Underdog?  He was a mild-mannered dog, but when stress and conflict were introduced to the plot he took a magic pill, he became a superhero. Istio is a superhero for Kubernetes.

Istio is an open, platform-independent service mesh that manages communications between services in a transparent way. With a distributed architecture many things can fail, slow down and become less secure. Istio provides solutions to those stresses in our plot toward this architecture style:

    • Traffic management

    • Observability

    • Policy enforcement

    • Service identity and security

 

We will explore these benefits with Istio through some working examples on Kubernetes. The key point is this meshing solution allows your Java code to be less coupled to the inherent weaknesses of a distributed platform.