Where is CEJUG?

Part of my time is dedicated to the Ceará Java User Group (CEJUG), a non-profit organization oriented to teach, share, and promote the Java Technology in Ceará. I'm one of the JUG leaders, who is responsible to coordinate many actions and represent the group out there. This voluntary work is the way that I found to help to develop my state, in Brazil.During the JavaPolis 2007, people asked me all the time where is my JUG. If I say "It is in Brazil", actually, it is a bad answer because of the Brazilian's continental dimension. I have to be precise all the time and say "CEJUG is located in Fortaleza, capital of the State of Ceará, an important state in the northeast of Brazil. We have many wonderful beaches and sun throughout the year!". The part about beach and sun is just to convince people to visit Fortaleza one day. You can see in the figure below a Google map showing Latin America, Brazil in the center and a balloon telling where CEJUG is precisely.

We are one of the biggest and most active JUGs in Brazil. The biggest one is the SouJava in São Paulo, followed by DFJUG, Brasília, RioJUG in Rio de Janeiro, and CEJUG in Fortaleza. In 2007, we went to some of the best Java conferences around the world, which are JavaOne, Jazoon and JavaPolis. During the conferences, we try to send the latest news about the platform to our community, we make contacts with other JUG leaders and with important IT players, mainly Sun Microsystems.
If you like Java and live in Fortaleza, be involved in our Java community. It is free of charge! All we want is that you share your knowledge with everybody and attend our monthly meetings.

JavaPolis: Just Started!!!

Monday, December 10, 2007: The first day, the first CEJUG experience in a JavaPolis edition. But, before starting, I would like to say that Antwerp is a really nice city, a good mix of a calm city and a big one. We can feel the Belgian peace of mind and kindness in all places here. Even not understanding the language (Flemish), it's relatively easy to use the public transportation and go to the conference venue. Anyway, if you have problems, everybody is able to speak English and help you.As you already know, the conference was sold out. All slots are in. So, I expected a crowded place, difficult to walk and find people. Fortunately, it is not true. The place is incredible, comfortable, beautiful and really appropriate to support the JavaPolis dimension.

Stephan, the JavaPolis organizer, talked in the Parleys Press news about the main attractions. This year, JavaPolis attracted about 10% more visitants than 2006. It shows the consolidation of the conference as a permanent schedule in your agenda, and it shows also a constant increasing of size, quality, importance and responsibility.

The most explored topic is Java Enterprise Edition (JEE). I tried to imagine the relationship between JEE and the Star Wars theme. So, see the list below:

• People feel like a JEDI when they are programming JEE applications.
• JEE and Spring are stars and they are in a war field.
• JEE is incredible for ones and unbelievable for others.
• When people move from J2EE to JEE, actually, they are changing only the type of war: from a medieval and hard to a intergalactic and fun one.

What is also cool is the presence of the Java's father, James Gosling (We can call him Master Yoda as well). He will be there on Wednesday. It is a good opportunity to improve our Jedi skills. We will have two big James' meetings. The first one is about the current state of the Java universe and the second one is a Q&A session, where people can ask almost everything.

It is all for now!! See you tomorrow!

Javapolis: Spirit of Friendship

Yesterday I was surprised about what I saw in the Javapolis homepage. Stephan, the Javapolis chairman, published my picture there! Actually, I'm a simple guy, a little bit shy and I don't want to become famous, but it is very cool for me and totally unexpected.

What I would like to say is that Javapolis is not yet another Java conference. It is a moment for friendship, where people are more important than technologies. Where everybody is simple, even our Java superstars.

I don't have doubts that it is a positive Java User Group influence. I remember in the last Jazoon conference, when Felipe Gaúcho started to promote the community through the official web blog. The conference became more soft, more people oriented, less technical, less corporative. I also appeared there thanks to my friendship with Gaúcho. Javapolis is a little better in this aspect: we became friends by e-mail, in one or two messages, in one or two days.

Javapolis will be great because there exists an excellent team promoting it and because everyone will do the same spontaneously.

Javapolis: the biggest Java conference in Europe

Next week, I will attend Javapolis, the biggest Java conference in Europe and the biggest Java User Group (JUG) conference around the world! The conference will be in Antwerp, Belgium, from December 10 to 14, 2007. It will be a great opportunity to meet people, to be up-to-date with the last Java technologies, have fun with wonderful Belgian biers and the most important thing: keep the CEJUG community connected virtually with that global event. It is a serious compromise with my JUG, which I'm proud to be one of the leaders.What I will do, basically, is to post news about Javapolis daily in the CEJUG website (www.cejug.org) and in this blog. The CEJUG content will be more journalistic, I mean, just saying facts, technologies, curiosities, etc, about the event. On the other hand, the blog will have an informal approach, where my opinion and personal emotions will be evident.

I started to plan my participation in the conference, as you can see in the picture below:

I'm using a special CEJUG t-shirt edition, created by Silveira Neto, one of the most active members of our Brazilian community. He is a technical guy with special talents in arts, as you can see in my back. At that moment, I was visiting the Javapolis website and checking the schedule to organize my agenda.

So, you are invited to visit my blog and the CEJUG website every day to follow the conference virtually. I promise I will do my best!

The OpenInterface Platform

In the last few months, I've been dedicating some time to collaborate with the OpenInterface platform, an open source project conceived to integrate components developed in different programming languages. But, why am I so interested on it? Basically, because it is part (not the main issue) of my research in multi modalities and because it is a project managed by people in my laboratory at Université catholique de Louvain.

The OpenInterface was conceived to support the development of multi modal applications. It is developed in C++ because of the team's expertise and for performance reasons. Its architecture is centered in a kernel, which intermediates the conversation between components. There is a proxy for each programming language able to invoke the component, send and receive data from it. Finally, the components are installed in the platform to be visible by other components.

It is true that you can use OpenInterface for different proposals. Actually, it is very attractive for software integration, but its focus is to work with components that implement any user interaction modality, like speech recognition, gesture recognition and so on. This focus was fixed because of the context where the platform was conceived: in a laboratory of signal processing, where exists a high volume of data processing but nobody cares if you will store the data in a database or interact with a message queue (there is no concern about transactions). The important aspect of the multi modal interaction domain is time. The volume of data is higher but not sensible enough to be reproved by small inconsistencies (detected by pattern recognition and other heavy strategies).

The platform has gained popularity nowadays because of many contributions of the community, who developed a rich set of components to improve the user interaction. Some cool components are: Simple Posture Recognition, Simple Image Navigator, 5DT Data Glove and others. A complete list is available in the OpenInterface platform website.

But, OpenInterface is not only a software platform. Actually, a complete environment was created around it. As you can see in the homepage of the OpenInterface website, there are 4 different and complementary initiatives, which are:

• OpenInterface Platform: it is what we discussed above. A framework to develop multi modal applications rapidly.


• OpenInterface Foundation: It is a non-profit organization to coordinate, expand and integrate activities of many people around the world involved in the field of multi modal interface research. One of the most important initiatives of the foundation was to create the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces.


• OpenInterface Forge: The source code of the OpenInterface Platform and all available contributions is available for free in the Forge website, which manages all contributions as open source projects.


• OpenInterface Strep: finally, this project is focused on the platform improvements and its integration with the industry.

If you want to evaluate or apply OpenInterface in your project, visit OpenInterface Forge website and get the binary distribution and other contributions. You can register and be involved in the project as a contributor. Assign to the mailing list of what you want to use and ask for help when necessary.