Reactive Programming in gaining a lot of attention recently, but what is it? It is a culmination of a lot of good ideas developed over the years, but brought together by the forces of recent developments, both in terms of software and hardware (multicores, mobile devices). Developing an application fast is easy, but developing applications that are responsive and resilient is not. In this presentation,​ we will quickly go over what reactive programming is and what a reactive application is, and then dive into code level details of how to actually create them.

Test Automation has been getting easier and easier with each technological development.  Thanks to the WebDriver interface, a single test can be built to run against different browsers.  The Selenium project uses the WebDriver interface to allow coding tests in various languages.  However, developing and maintaining Selenium tests end up becoming a whole development effort unto itself.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a programming language that reads more like English?  Where tests all follow the same pattern?  Where the language aligns well with the requirements that are to be verified?
This talk will focus on bringing together a few technologies that take you to the next higher level of coding using Domain Specific Languages (DSL); Groovy, Geb, and Spock.  Groovy enables the authoring of DSLs.  Geb is a DSL that makes Selenium coding simpler and allows you to do more with less code.  And Spock is a more logical way of writing tests (actually, they are called Specifications) that read like the requirements being verified.

What does this mean to you, the developer, the test engineer, the stakeholder?  More efficient testing by having less test code to maintain, a coding interface that enables automating the creation of test stubs, and a closer alignment of the tests to the requirements.

We will also build a Selenium Grid of various Operating Systems and Browsers using Docker.
Finally, we will run our Geb+Spock tests against our Selenium Grid.

Reactive architecture is an architecture style utilizing events combined with message processing to react to various aspects of the system. Applications build in the reactive architecture style remain responsive under load, resilient in the face of failure, and elastic under varying load conditions. All of these aspects are achieved through an event-driven architecture style. In this presentation I will leverage both slides and live coding using only core Java and RabbitMQ to describe and demonstrate many of the patterns used to build reactive systems, including monitoring patterns, supervisor patterns, event routing patterns, eventual consistency patterns, and many more.

Ever wonder when Java will be out of class path hell? Java 9 is for application developers, library developers by enablement of a scalable platform, greater platform integrity and improved performance. In this talk we will explore Project Jigsaw, HTTP 2.0, Lightweight JSON API and many other features.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the de-facto leader in the cloud services framework and you owe it to yourself to know at least a little bit about it. AWS consists of over over sixty individual services, each of which is powerful separately but together are truly compelling. The flip of this is that there is a lot to learn. In this talk we'll start with an overview of the range of services and then give more details on a few of the individual services. We'll do some slides, but mostly we'll walk through the actual AWS Console... and possibly even do some live coding!

Once an API is released to production and entrenched in the core business, it can be difficult to modernize over time. In this talk, we'll dive into the techniques and supporting software we developed which allowed us to transition seamlessly from a high-traffic legacy python API to a new one written completely in Java. We'll cover how we created tooling and a visual interface for detecting and exploring output differences, segmented traffic to roll out gradually, and introduced canary deployments to ensure safer deployments.

Monitoring and Management of application deployments that use modern frameworks and large scale distributed environments. This presentation focusses on using the AppDynamics APM solution in the full product development lifecycle to diagnose performance and behavioral issues in a large scale event driven environments that also use Map/Reduce tool sets. Heavily distributed environments create a unique set of challenges and opportunities for development team, tools like AppDynamics allow teams to learn how their solutions live and breath in this new world of complexity and quickly identify performance issue down to the code level. We also look at the telemetry of an application and approaches for extracting meaningful data from transaction flow of your applications.

With the ever increasing need to extract information from large data sources, "Big Data" is becoming very hot. We will have a set of presentations showing how the big data technologies line up for to solve problems. We will cover industry use-cases, challenges driving technologies in this space, architectures for using these technologies, and what some of the main technology options are. 

We will also dive into two particular technologies: We will introduce Cassandra as an option for storage - in particular for when you need high scalability and for fault-tolerance on commodity hardware (or cloud infrastructure). For processing options we will introduce Spark for fast large-scale data processing using an intuitive and unified API.

Java 8 is the biggest change to the Java language ever. The addition of lambdas, functional interfaces, and streams fundamentally changes the programming model for applications. This talk summarizes those changes, along with optionals, method references, and other new features of the language.

Demonstrations will include the map/filter/reduce mechanism, the streaming API, how to write functional interfaces, predicates, suppliers, consumers, method references, default methods in interfaces, optionals, and more.

NOTE: This month's meeting is on a WEDNESDAY, due to an activity conflict with our site host, Constant Contact, who were very gracious about rescheduling one day earlier than normal to August 12. In all other respects, this is a regular meeting - although there's nothing "regular" about our excellent NFJS speaker!

July is no longer a “skip” month for the NEJUG. This year, we begin a new schedule making July the “Group Business” meeting. We will still meet on the same calendar schedule: the second Thursday of the month, yielding July 9, 2015. There will be no educational program for the evening: no Lightning Talks and no Main Technical Presentation. Rather, the time normally alloted for those meeting items will be used for group business.

The main agenda are:

1. Historical overview of the NEJUG
   1. Brief leadership history
   2. Description of current leadership team
2. Review, Modification, and Ratification of Founding Documents
   1. NEJUG Vision
   2. NEJUG Articles of Association
3. Selection of Officers
4. Open format discussion of future goals

We're hoping for a good attendence of members interested in the inner workings of the group, able to offer their experience and insights into how the group will function moving forward. In addition, with roles clearly defined, we expect more members than ever to step forward to help the NEJUG deliver value by volunteering their time. (Volunteerism not required to participate in the Group Business meeting.)