Felipe Gaucho's Blog

Felipe Vieira Silva, a brazilian known as Felipe Gaucho, started his computing career in the 90's (C/C++, VB) and first tried Java in 1998 during the development of a robot arm simulator as a student of scientific initiation program at UNISINOS. One year later he concluded his course and becomes an enthusiastic about Java, seeking the tricks about the new technology and joining himself to projects that involved the concept of portable software - the fever of that time. On December 2002 he concluded his Masters Degree in the Federal University of Cear?, publishing his dissertation about "Planning & Scheduling" and started teaching in faculties of computing. The challenges of the new career revealed an exciting area: Learning & Education. Observing the behaviour of students and teachers, he started dreaming with several computational solutions for questions like "how to enhance the teaching?", "how to facilitate learning by the students?" and other common issues shared by the academic community. Nowadays, Felipe Ga?cho is seeking a PhD opportunity in order to improve his knowledge and enhance his capacity of contribution for the society. The establishment of the Schoolbus Project in the JELC community was an important step in that direction, and he believes he can become a good researcher in the next few years.

Cejug-Classifieds goes Metro

Caravan to Jazoon'08

CEJUG is organizing the Caravan Jazoon'08, a group of JUG members interested in to participate of Jazoon'08. Inspired in similar initiatives by SouJava and other groups, this one has a differential: the JUG serves not only as communication channel, but also as a secure source of information about who are attending the conference - and it is a valuable input for conference organizers. Jazoon'08 is open for business and the goal of the conference administrators is to give fair opportunities for everyone interested in joining the conference, including very low fares for students, discount for JUG members and discount for groups of professionals. One of the main issues of that flexibility is how to control Who is JUG member?. Since the conference is international, it is virtually impossible for the conference organizers to check the information provided by more than two thousand attendees.

The social network strength of Java User Groups

As a JUG leader and also as a professional, I helped Jazoon to organize its first edition in 2007. My task was to provide information about Java community, and put the conference administrators in contact with the community stake holders - not all of them, of course, but I guess I did a good work in helping conference and Java community to get closer to each other. The experience provided me a good feedback on how big conferences are organized and what are the big issues in provide discount vouchers and free passes - basically, the lack of accurate information restricts the ability of conference organizers of thinking about better conditions for the Java community. Jazoon has a very elegant package of benefits for its attendees, but it causes a lot of headache for the organizers, and I can assume this is the same scenario for JavaOne, Javapolis and any other conference with superlative numbers. The good news: JUGs can help conferences to attract more people in a more fair way - JUGs are the local community snapshot, and they are the place you must go if you need information about Java communities all over the world.

How Caravana Jazoon'08 works?

It is simple: we created a home-page, where we publish useful information about traveling to Switzerland, and we also publish the pictures and names of the confirmed attendees. This way, we can identify ourselves, exchange traveling tips and - the most important - guarantee for the conference organizers clear and trustful information about who is asking discount vouchers.

It is our first travel initiative, but we plan to extend it to JavaOne and others. If our group of interested travelers grows up enough, we can start to negotiate with conference organizers, tourism agencies, etc.

* Caravan @ wikipedia

Is software beyond hardware?

The discussion started in my JUG mailing list, where some members started celebrating the availability of YouTube for Mobile Devices, including remarkable advances of the nowadays gadgets, like the supposedly revolutionary features of IPhone and a lot of other technologies. The aftermath of the flame produced some insights I would like to share with you, but not before a context quiz: When the keyboard was invented? When the mouse was invented? How frequently you run applications in your cell phone? If not much, why? How many pages you can type in a small device before to hit it in the wall? How many hours - compared to your TV or your computer - you spend using your mobile devices? If not much, why? Which is more expensive in your working place: your computer or your chair? When was the last time you updated or replaced a software? When was the last time you updated or replaced a hardware? Pervasive computing means you to carry everything in your pocket? If not, why you still carrying it? So, if you start looking around and thinking of what your are using, perhaps you share my perception about the gap between hardware and software. Few more thoughts and you realize the different velocity some technologies are adopted comparing to others, and the obvious commercial side-effects. One of the key points of our discussion was about powerful tools of mobile devices and the real adoption of such features. No doubt modern cell phones can seduce you with those colored keys, multimedia features and fancy design... but think twice, how frequently you actually use it for something you really need? The hardware hurts you A short survey gave us the impression about the most popular features of mobile devices: SMS, GPS and - of course - the phone. We could not identify the adoption of anything much beyond those basic functionalities. Despite all arguments used to justify why the revolutionary features are not being adopted in large scale by end user, I have a strong feeling about the main reason: the hardware is just boring. The hardware hurts you, it destroys your body and your patience, and doesn't matter your expectations about the next cell phone xyz99, it will come with a newer version of the same too small buttons, tiring screen and probably it will be just a replacement of your current walkman. Keyboards? Come on, when was the last time you invest real money in a keyboard? Cheapest seems to be the most successfully brand in the keyboards market. Mouse? Do you really like it? And what about the furniture? Do you really believe the designer/architect who designed your chair spends 12 hours coding every day? eheh, I guess not, the artistic designer is probably more busy thinking about colors and other very important details. Important for sale, I guess :) Innovation == renovation? Thinking about the last 30 years (sorry, more than that I should be born again), I can remember real revolutions in movies, image, sound, software. From computer technology, hardware evolved a lot, including astronomical amount of memory we use nowadays and the allucinogenous CPU velocity. But about design, it is a bit hard to defend. While we wait for the Quantum Physics to offer us another computer model, we seem to be locked in old paradigms. I would like not to go so far in science because it is just a blog, but returning to the subject of our mundane gadgets I guess we are waiting too long for better devices, aren't we? I must confess the discussion was quite interesting and I pretty sure about its controversial side-effects, but instead of bothering you more about my insights, I prefer to leave these ideas open for discussion. Perhaps you can show me other perspective, something to convince me to give a second chance to try the cell phone. A wish for my next cell phone I want my cell phone to read my email messages for me, and I want to have a chance to speak the responses or new messages while the phone converts the sound in text messages. It seems better than another five different ways to manipulate the renewed versions of the same icons through the same buttons :)

Pictures copied from Wikipedia for non-commercial purposes ;)

Netbeans & Eclipse - confluence is possible

Trying NetBeans 6.1 I got Eclipse and NetBeans ready for my collaborators in a transparent way. Actually I started the Footprint Project few months ago with NetBeans, and later I also started using Eclipse to maintain its contents because I use different environments in my daylight job and in my Open Source activities.

After few trials, I was forced to abandon NetBeans due to the absence of support for JUnit 4.1, but after the release of the newest NetBeans, I got JUnit and several other interesting features that put me back on track about offering the community a more comfortable development environment. Today, you can checkout Footprint Project both in Eclipse and NetBeans IDE without loss of productivity or any need of special configuration tricks.

And what about configuration files? The configuration files of both platforms are committed under version control and I noticed they are ignored by the other platform. Eclipse shows an alert in the problems list, and the internal file used by NetBeans for automatic updating of ANT tasks is also marked as problem, but it has no impact on the development environment and the project normally compiles, runs and executes tests in both IDEs. What is the big deal on using two IDEs in a same project? In commercial projects, probably the best strategy is to bet in a unique platform and find a way to extract the best that IDE can give you, eventually including some platform specific tricks in your configuration to enhance your productivity. But technology is not static and sometimes it is nice to keep an open mind about what is going on in the open source community. I will not promote here another tiring comparison of IDE flame, we have enough of that in every Java mailing list, but I'd rather to post some positive thoughts from my personal experience: NetBeans offers automatic updating of ANT tasks if you change artifacts and/or structure of your project. For example, if you include a new folder, NetBeans add its reference in your ANT tasks definition. The Sun IDE also offers an impressive i18n support with features to refactor old projects in order to verify missed constants. On the other side, Eclipse is still the most comfortable Java editor available, fast and reliable. Both IDEs offer a very good Subversion support and the most common development features without great differences - despite personal opinions, of course ;) That's it for now, I am very happy with the recent advances of NetBeans IDE and I am for a long time fan of Eclipse, so what I suggest you to do is to try both IDEs and find out what best fits your project requirements. Afterwards, the best comparison available continues to be your own experience.

PUJ - Code Competition for University Students

PUJ is a new competition format that allows companies to acknowledge the best Java codes produced by students during an academic semester. Check out the competition rules created by CEJUG to promote the synergy between IT market and universities - including preliminary results.

PUJ - a code competition template

In this link you can find the translated rules of PUJ (Prêmio Universitário Java), a competition organized by CEJUG at the end of 2007. The competition inspiration states as:

	To offer the local market a chance to evaluate what is produced	in Java classes
	of universities, allowing companies and universities to share the same goal of 
	helping people and market to become more productive.

The idea is to promote the collaboration between local people toward a better society, identifying shared values in all layers of the IT productivity chain, including students, teachers and professionals. Apparently obvious at first sight, this idea proved not so simple to be implemented in the real world. CEJUG held the first edition of PUJ at the end of 2007, and some very interesting feedback was collected. Some of those experiences, including the polemic points are discussed below.

1. Can I reuse the PUJ format in my local JUG or company?

   Please copy the PUJ idea, be my guest to reuse the proposed rules. PUJ was invented to help people to promote Java and to unify Java people around the idea of quality software development. The competition format and its former ideas are not new, and you probably can enumerate a large set of similar initiatives, but PUJ is distributed without authorship in a hope to be adopted by the largest number of people. If you have a JUG, please do your own PUJ - you can change the name, and if you like it we only ask you to quote CEJUG somewhere ;)

2. Everyone is responsible by the quality of the education process.

   A beautiful side-effect of PUJ is to distribute the idea quality on all partners of the educational process: students, professors and companies. When a teacher knows his class statements will go public, he becomes naturally concerned about the quality of the statements. Other good side-effect is the comparison between several statements done by students and the market professionals, avoiding bad teachers to continue to destroy the future of the young talents. Basic posting: bad professionals, bad teachers and bad students do not find space to hide under PUJ - I invite you to think about that.

3. What kind of statement is used in PUJ?

   All kind of statement, the submissions of PUJ should include works already done - the competition itself does not provide any statement. The goal of PUJ is to ask IT professionals to evaluate what is being produced inside classrooms, and it does not make sense to restrict or to force a specific type of work to be evaluated. Advanced mathematics and tic-tac-toe programs are supposed to be eligible to participate in the same level. Apparently unfair, we detected some interesting points about that:

   • The number of submitted works was much lower than we expected. It unveiled a simple fact that graduation students are not producing much Java code or they are producing low quality works. We didn't received the advanced mathematics works as well we didn't received the tic-tac-toe ones :) The small number of submission suggests us to promote PUJ and forces the universities to explain why their students are not competing - since the universities are always doing marketing about their high-quality classes, where is this quality?

   • The local universities share a very similar curriculum. The subjects and type of works are the same. Part of this similarity comes from the government regulation of education, and part comes from the lack of creativity of the teachers, who prefer to copy the old statements instead of adapting it to their pupils reality.

   • The code of students from different universities was much less different than we expected. In a first moment, the famous universities were considered virtual champions and we expected their students will annihilate the other ones by superior education. The reality exposed a close ability between students from several different universities. We don't have a stable opinion about the causes, but we believe it is due to the fact that academic recognition comes from scientific research and not from technical education.

4. What are the evaluation criteria?

   This is a recurrent question, and it seems locked in the traditional programming competition formats, where the rules are settled as static criteria from a point of view of a unique company or group of persons. In the real world, the idea of quality is not limited to a tabular enumeration of criteria, and the common sense about what is good or not seems to be more a natural perception about quality than cold numbers or technical arguments. The only criterion suggested by PUJ to the evaluators was: Classify the quality of the students work using your own point of view.

5. Does it make sense to allow people to judge something without establishing clear rules on how to do that?

   Simple answer: YES, it makes absolute sense to ask people about the quality of something even if we know some of them may not have solid background to understand or even classify it - because this is what happens in the real world. How many times did you notice that amazing idea failing as commercial product?

   In case of PUJ, it is even more fair because the evaluators are participating in the competition themselves - students, teachers and IT professionals looking for a shared mind about what is being produced inside classrooms. The trick to minimize deviations is to consider the different level of maturity of the participants - we adopted weights based on the role each evaluator play in the local market: students opinion is weaker than senior professionals opinion, but all opinions are contributing to the final grade of the works. The more people you include in this peer-review process the more fair it becomes. In the first edition of PUJ, we defined the following opinion weights:

   • IT professionals: grade x 7
   • Instructors: grade x 4
   • Students: grade x 1

6. Why not to use technologies categories?

   This is an open decision, and in the first edition of the prize we asked people to focus more on the quality of the implemented solution than in its underneath technologies. We believe it reflects the IT market, because no client ask you to do a software with technology A or B, clients are looking for solutions to their problems. One nice side-effect of the first edition of PUJ was to discuss the epistemic view of the novice developers: Students tend to focus on technologies instead of focus on the solution of problems.

   To contribute to dismiss this problem, PUJ asked the students to compete in the same arena with their preferred weapons ;). The first reaction to this idea was a lot of questions like How can I apply my Swing application against the other student's Ajax application ? This reflected the students' fetish about hype technologies instead of the quality of solutions. Students tend to classify something better even before to look at it, just because they know certain technology was used - and it is nocive to their own carriers. The goal here is to put experimented professionals and students evaluating the same code and to give the students a chance to think about why some works are better than others even using a supposedly worse technology?

   Special remark: it worked fine in the first edition and the controversial discussion about that continue to echo in our JUG lists. We believe this was one of the best contribution of PUJ to the approximation of academic reality to the local market expectations. The PUJ competition does not aim to evaluate technologies, the goal is to evaluate the quality of students' works - in a perfect scenario, people learn how to think about the problems and their solutions instead of trying to force the adaptation of the problems to their preferred technologies. Of course the grades were contaminated with the hype but we believe with time this strategy will help to reduce the gap between classrooms and development centers.

And the winner is...

First edition of PUJ was experimental, but proved its values with some good competitors, besides going under the spotlight of Ceará IT market. The local results are more important in local community, but I would like to use this space to honor the great winner of the 1st PUJ: Alexandre Pinheiro e Silva, student of UNIFOR University. He produced a work titled "Virtual Video Rental Store", a web application using Struts and EJB3 technologies. The second place was granted to Francisco de Assis Ribeiro Junior, student of FIC Faculty. He produced a work about process communication, a Peer to Peer application based on Sockets. Both works with source code and comments (only in Portugese) are available here.

That's it, we confirmed the second edition of PUJ to the first semester of 2008, and we expect to evolve from the original model to something that can help universities and companies to establish their shared values. We believe one of the prime goals of a JUG is to promote Java, and to put students to compete is a good action in this sense.

If you have ideas on how to improve the PUJ format, or if you identify problems in our rules, please comment in the form below.

April 2008

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Recent Entries

Cejug-Classifieds goes Metro

Caravan to Jazoon'08

Is software beyond hardware?

Articles

The Requisites of a Question-Management System
The Quaestio module of the java.net Schoolbus project hopes to make it easier for teachers and professors to manage the questions they use on tests, quizzes, and homework. As project contributor Felipe Gaucho explains, hammering out the needs, goals, and concepts of such a system is tricker than it looks. Sep. 2, 2004

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