Van Riper's Blog

Michael Van Riper has a Bachelors in Computer Science from MIT. Van has more than 25 years of experience as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. He was a core member of the engineering team at Adobe that built the award winning Adobe PageMill web authoring program. Since 1999, he has focused on developing web applications in Java. He is currently a Principal Engineer at Krillion in Mountain View, California. He is also the founder and co-leader of the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG.

2007 Rich Web Experience: Up Close and Personal

There were about 300 people in attendance at this conference. There were about 40 people presenting during this three day event. With the communal meals and an attendee/speaker ratio on the order of 8 to 1, there was ample opportunity for attendees to have in-depth conversations with the speakers that you don't normally see at most other conferences. Plus, these speakers are all top caliber folks in the web development field.

Personally, I was able to have an extended conversation with Keith Donald from Interface21 on Friday evening during a conference social hour. This will hopefully lead to a visit by Rod Johnson to one of our Silicon Valley JUG meetings in the coming months.

I would have *loved* to attend the entire conference. Unfortunately, my work commitments did not allow me to do so. Still, the sessions I attended on Saturday were all uniformly excellent. I definitely learned a few new things to add to my bag of tricks when it comes to writing and debugging AJAX code from Venkat Subramaniam on Saturday morning. Besides being an extremely entertaining presenter, Scott Davis gave us a really deep dive into GIS for Web Developers during a 3 hour workshop on Saturday afternoon too.

I had heard great things from others that had attended previous NoFluffJustStuff conferences. My personal experience on Saturday was consistent with those earlier rave reviews. I was glad to hear of their plans for another Rich Web Experience conference in the fall of 2008 here in Silicon Valley. If you missed this one though and want something sooner than that, there is the Bay Area Software Symposium being held in Sunnyvale next month on October 19-21.

2007 Rich Web Experience on September 6-8

The No Fluff Just Stuff symposium series has announced the 2007 Rich Web Experience coming September 6-8 to San Jose, California. RWE 2007 will cover all of the hot areas of interest in the web space today: JavaScript, Ajax, CSS, Flex, Design, etc.... with over 50 technical sessions, panel discussions, keynotes, birds of a feather and open space sessions. RWE 2007 will also include a half day of training in JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, GWT, and Flex.

Special Java User Group Discount of $200 is available! The discount is good thru Monday, August 20th. Use the discount code rwe2007javaug when registering.

2007 Keynote Speakers

• WSI: Crimes Against Web Standards by Molly Holzschlag
• The State of Ajax by Douglas Crockford
• Beyond Ajax by Jesse James Garrett
• The One Web by Eric Miller

What distinguishes RWE 2007 from other Ajax/Web 2.0 Conferences

• 90 Minute Sessions
• Half-Day Workshop Included
• 6 Concurrent Sessions
• Limited Attendance (500 participants)
• All Meals Included
• Unbelievable Swag - Every Attendee gets a Nintendo Wii or iPod Video (30GB)!!

Chance To Win Free Registration

The Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG and the Silicon Valley JUG are co-hosting a talk by Burr Sutter (Sun Java Champion, President of the Atlanta JUG, and a JBoss Engineer) on an open source Enterprise Service Bus for SOA middleware. We will be raffling off a free registration to RWE 2007 at the end of the talk (your odds will be better than 1 in 100). The meeting is coming up on August 21 at VeriSign in Mountain View. Meetings are always free, but, they do require an advance email RSVP for this particular event. Go here for RSVP instructions and further details about the JUG event.

That's All Folks!

BarCampBlock in Palo Alto on August 18-19

BarCampEarth (formerly BarCampWorldwide) is a simultaneous compendium of Barcamps around the world to commemorate the anniversary of the first-ever BarCamp. This year's event will take place Aug 17-19 around the world. In Silicon Valley, the local event is BarCampBlock in Palo Alto on August 18-19. The plan for this year is to have a multi-office party starting at SocialText's offices... and looping in nearby neighbors like IDEO, Edgeio, Intalio and so on. Current sponsors include Socialtext, Strategiclee, Web2.0 Expo, Techcrunch, Google, Yahoo, Lumeno.us, IDEO, Edgeio, and Intalio.

You can register for the event here. However, you should also add yourself to the attendee list on the event wiki. I'll be there and I hope to see many of the Java developers that attend the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG meetings there too.

San Francisco Bay Area Java Communities

I am one of the leaders of the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG. This JUG and the Silicon Valley JUG meet regularly at Google in Mountain View on the third Tuesday of the month. It might seem odd that there are two JUGs in Silicon Valley, but, it has worked out nicely now that we hold joint meetings regularly. It helps to distribute the work load of lining up speakers and organizing meetings every month. These meetings are always free and open to the public.

Although the meetings are not free (unless you already have a paid membership to SDForum), the SDForum Java SIG meets on the first Tuesday of the month at the Cubberly Community Center in Palo Alto. Meetings are free for SDForum members and $15 at the door for non-members.

If you are looking for a Java community in the East Bay, there is the eBIG Java SIG that meets on the third Wednesday of the month in Oakland. This group is led by Chris Richardson, the author of POJOs In Action. Meetings are free for eBIG members, $10 for non-members that pre-register, and $15 at the door for non-members.

If I missed any other Java Communities that meet regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, please let me know about them and I'll update this blog post accordingly. Thanks!

September 2007

Search this blog:

Categories

Archives

September 2007
August 2007
June 2007

Recent Entries

2007 Rich Web Experience: Up Close and Personal

2007 Rich Web Experience on September 6-8

BarCampBlock in Palo Alto on August 18-19

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.