Ice's blog

Once again, this Wednesday, JUGMK held a technical session on popular and interesting subjects, in the interest of the Java community in Macedonia.

In the presence of 50+ Java professionals and enthusiasts, the presentations were held in the premises of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies.

The conference room was too small to accomodate the audience, which makes it easy for us to continue organize and give even better presentations, in the interest of the Java community.

Let's now go to the presentations themselves.

The first presentation, given by myself, explored a new and exciting build tool for Java applications, called Buildr, which after the experience and usage of the most popular tools Ant and Maven, tried to get the best of the both worlds by having the power and flexibility of Ant while retaining the Maven philosophy in the background.

The whole fundamentals of the entire build lifecycle were presented throughout the presentation, with the intent to excite you about the tool and maybe provide an alternative to your current build system which will solve your Ant or Maven headaches.

The slides from the presentation:

 The second presentation, given by Nikolche Mihajlovski, explored the world JavaFX. This newest addition on the pallete of Java technologies from Sun, offers the creation of user friendly & appealing GUIs, independant of the platform (from Desktop, Web to Mobile, even TVs and other househeld appliances are planned in the future).

We are witnessing a craze from the market for impressive frontend GUIs, and following the previous presentation of Google Web Toolkit, this presentation explores another way of doing those visually appealing interfaces in your Java applications.

The slides from the presentation:

The third and final presentation for this session, given by Aleksandar Nikov, explored the powerfull and easy way of creating visual applications using the Graphical Editing Framework. The domain of these application can be various from simple diagram builders to complex representation and manipulation business systems.

By abstracting the most common need of this kind of applications (like dragging, dropping, selection, outline...) and providing an easy extending model, it gives you a big head start when developing such an applications. You just need to worry of your specific business domain and inherit and re-use the rest of 'middleware common services' from this framework.

The platform is entirely open-source, which enables you develop and easilly to package it as your final product.

The slides from the presentation:

Thanks for coming for the ones present, for the rest: be sure not to miss it the next time.