events

London Events Round Up - Monday 28th March 2011

Events coming up

There is another fun and engaging Clojure Coding dojo on Tuesday and is as popular as ever as the event is full. It will be the last dojo before my “Getting started with Clojure” talk at JAX London, so am looking forward to learning some more things I can put into the talk.

Simon Maple and Zoey Slattery are also running the “OSGi: Lets get started” event on Tuesday. This will be a great way to understand OSGi and what it can do to help your Java development and deployment.

_Please see the list at the end of this email for a full schedule of up coming events.

News

Time is running out to contribute to the community testing of the Java SE 7 Developer Preview Release. The latest build is feature complete, stable and ready to roll – so download, test and report bugs. If you submit a bug report before April 4th, the Java product team will sing your praises on the Java SE 7 Honor Role, plus they will send you some Java swag. Bugs reported later on might not get fixed in time for the initial release, so if you want to be a contributor to Java SE 7 do it before the April deadline.

Firefox 4 was officially released last week and has already broken all the browser download records, with twice as many downloads as IE9 in the space of 24 hours. In less than a week there have been around 37 million – which you can see if you head over to the neat looking download stats page, a great example of data visualisation and interaction. Its good to see Europe beating North America at something, as we are still ahead in numbers of downloads. Inside of Europe, Gernany is well ahead of everyone else and has more than twice the downloads of the UK.

Ubuntu Full Circle magazine #47 is out and includes more programing in Python, LibreOffice and eBook Reader Software. There is also a special edition: The Perfect Server detailing how to build a an Ubuntu 9.10 server and configure lots of common server services, available in English and Italian. Even though its based on the older Ubuntu 9.10 server, all the steps are pretty much the same for the lasted 10.10 server version.

There are more videos available from The Server Side Symposium, including this short about Java 7 from two people you may recognise.

Summary of Last weeks events

At the Weekday testers event, there were over 40 testers online across several countries trying out different aspects of Firefox. Javascript processing is much improved and makes certain sites much quicker to load.  Flash support seems much better and watching flash videos seemed quicker to load and start than in Chrome. If you get the very latest build of chrome (or chromium on Ubuntu) then firefox was a few milliseconds slower, but the page rendering differences were hard to measure as they were so close.  I still use Firefox and Chromium together for my browsing, mainly so I can have different accounts on the same sites.

Cuke Up was a great day of behaviour driven development and acceptance testing with many of the project leaders and influential people speaking or chatting between talks. Highlights of the day for me include:

  • Matt Wynne – Mortgage Driven Development 
  • Dan North and Liz Keogh – Deliberate Discovery

  • Aslak Hellesoy – Keynote and Cucumber update - It was great to hear that Cuke4Duke, the cucumber style acceptance testing framework will be getting a major upgrading to make it simpler to use.  Currently it runs via JRuby and a few other libraries, so the plan it to make it more Java like so you can use Cucumber.java.

  • There is also active development in the management of all your scenario files with the development of the Relish tool, a web based tool to manage and navigate through your scenario files. You will also be able to work with your cucumber files via a website, allowing you to edit your scenarios and features, making it very easy for non-technical team members to work with cucumber.

To see some of the soundbites of the conference, look at the twitter tag #cukeup

Podcasts

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know or send them directly to me.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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