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.)

Apache Hadoop is a powerful and sometimes complex tool for dealing with Big Data as well as high data throughput applications which can enable some existing applications to finally run right as well as open doors for entirely new types of applications and analysis. So the question is how does one get started with Hadoop? This presentation explores the various introductory aspects of the Hadoop infrastructure, data sources and query strategies and planning so you can get started with Hadoop.

Through this introductory no non-sense presentation we will explore various environmental options to design your initial cluster; such as physical vs virtual environments. In addition, we will explore various data ingestion and modeling strategies so you can populate your new cluster with the data required for your analysis in an Agile way. Finally, we will review various strategies available to process and query your data so you can get value from the cluster.

We will take a look at building HTML5 web applications in Java using the open source Vaadin framework. Vaadin takes a different approach to web application development by automating many of the most time consuming aspects of traditional web development. Instead of constructing your application from low level DOM elements and manually handling communication and data serialization, Vaadin  takes care of server-client communication and allows you to work with higher level UI elements in Java. The end result is a great looking HTML5 web application that you can use in any browser.

During the presentation, we'll build a Vaadin application from scratch to demonstrate the basic principles and development practices hands-on. We'll take a look at why and when you would want to use Vaadin, and will also investigate how things work under the hood. At the end of the presentation you should have learned enough that you can start building your first Vaadin application. 

ALSO, we have a 15-minute Lightning Talk:

You've come up with a killer idea for an app that you want to dive into, but first you need to bootstrap the project and code in order to get to the point where you can actually work on your idea. Slogging through dependencies, setting up configuration files – none of that is fun.

Frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Grails, and many JavaScript tools are designed to allow you to rapidly generate scaffolding (boilerplate) code to help you get going with both a project and with individual pieces of your application. One of the emerging solutions for Java-based projects is JHipster ("Java hipster"), which enables you to quickly generate a Web application based on Spring Boot that includes AngularJS support and automatically adds a number of excellent libraries for securing, managing, monitoring, and testing to your project.

Kyle Smith is going to walk you through setting up a new project using JHipster and show you some of the features you get out of the box. He'll also look briefly at some of the features that modern applications are expected to include, such as metrics, health checks, and auditing.

We've all heard – and we've even said it ourselves, that “soft skills” make a critical difference in an engineer's career. Oddly, despite this recognition of their importance, the whole cluster of soft skill competencies are rarely given more than lip service. With the April 9 meeting, the NEJUG will make a multi-faceted push to rectify this short fall.

In a series of short presentations, experienced professionals from a range of companies will each focus on one or two specific soft skills, such as Integrity in Work, Listening, Cooperation and Alignment, Technical Writing, Leadership, Public Speaking, and others. Each presenter will give their perspective on the importance of their skill topic, share in detail how it makes a real difference, and – most importantly, provide a specific technique for developing that skill. Where appropriate, a live demonstration of the technique will be made, possibly including a short in situ exercise.

After about 5 of such mini-presentations, we will switch to a panel discussion format. One or two prepared questions will get the ball rolling, after which we will take questions from the floor. As time allows, the panel should have at least 20 – 30 minutes to deepen this very important conversation.