Sun Java Evangelist, Sang Shin recently wrapped up a 5 day trip to the JRSL conference in Chile. JRSL09 is community organized conference by open source enthusiasts in South America. Countries (Argentina, Chile, and a few other countries except Brazil) take turns hosting the event. This year's event was attended by ~1100 people. Sang's talks: "Java SE 5, Java SE 6, JDK 7", 3-hour JavaFX workshop (2 hour lecture + 1-hour hands-on lab) [a couple folks currently using Flex, asked me if JavaFX supports "Flex remote object binding(?)" kind of capability. I told them JavaFX supports RESTful Web services API which should suffice for most remote communication needs]; Ruby/JRuby/Rails workshop. Sang, also attended a 2-day Mozilla conference. Highlights: Firefox now command 23% of the browser market world-wide; In some countries (some European countries), the market share are close to 50%; During the 9-month period, the Firefox usage went up from 5 million to 9 million in the South America region; Mozilla guys seem to be very confident that they will keep gain market share at the expense of IE; OpenVideo in HTML 5 will make flex/flash a dinosaur, eventually, but it will take a few years. Sang's trip was sponsored by: Exelsys, a ~50-person consulting company who specialize in Java EE-based financial apps for the Chilean banks...more info at javapassion.com ***Sang will next be speaking at DEVOXX.

Sun Microsystems Java Evangelist Doris Chen reports: "...The 4th Silicon Valley Code Camp took place at Foothill College (Los Altos, CA) on (Oct. 3-4). Over a thousand developers attended this event and 140+ sessions were presented. I presented "Developing Revolutionary Web Applications using Comet and Ajax Push [on Slide Share]". The session was extremely well attended (full house with around 80 people). The session was very demo intensive. I did 4 demos and showed a lot of code throughout the presentation. The session is well received as I got a lot of good feedback and questions during the session and afterward. One engineer from Yahoo Java EE group asked for more follow up as they are planning to use Comet for a future project.... Thanks again to Michael Van Riper and Kevin Nilson (Silicon Valley Web User Group) for inviting me back this year...." -- Doris.
Also, sessions by: Sun GlassFish Evangelist Arun Gupta [blog entry w/presentions here] and Java Champion Stephen Chin - "Getting started with JavaFX/WidgetFX + the New JUGPrize wheel. SVCODECAMP "presos" are up on slideshare.net.

The Java Users Group of the Federal District of Brazil in Brasilia – DFJUG (www.dfjug.org) was established in 1998 out of a need for qualified Java professionals. Today, with 46,983 members, DFJUG is considered one of the largest Java User groups in the world. It is DFJUG's educational focus which is the main driver that keeps this community together and growing --- Why?

Daniel deOliveira (currently working at the Brazilian Ministry of Planning) explains, that in Brazil, there is a shortage of IT professionals. There are currently 40,000 java-related jobs that are open and unfilled in Brazil. Furthermore, Brazil's formal educational sector (universities, colleges, technical and IT schools) has not been able to meet the demand. So, DFJUG began searching for answer(s) and asking questions like: Where does one find individuals that fit the IT developer profile? Where to find these “geniuses” that, without any formal or academical training, are capable of disassembling and reassembling a cell phone or even program these devices?

Recently, Sun's Scott McNeally was interviewed by businessweek.com “Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education”. There is a connection between this article and what groups like DFJUG have been doing with student developers. (i.e ...Web technology being used to shake-up education, the way it rocked newspapers and the music industry...). What was not mentioned in the article was Sun's contribution in founding/funding the Java Education and Development Initiative (JEDI) which is an open-source education curriculum at the University of the Philippines.

JEDI seemed like DFJUG's answer. So naturally, good community leaders tend to gravitate to each other, and the JEDI professors met Daniel as Java Champions at JavaOne in 2006, one thing led to another and JEDI-Brasil was created. Today, the program has (9) open source course modules focused on Java programming which is now serving over 39,000 students online. The initial training provides a foundation for future Java training and potential certification.

To see more about JEDI-Brasil check out DFJUG's online website, which serves as a online training platform for free video-based training modules (in Portuguese). Sun has donated a SunFire T2000 server in 2009 to help the JEDI-Brasil effort. Daniel can be reached via the website and will be coming to the U.S. in late 2009 to work on his doctoral thesis.

Sang reports: "....Dan Sline co-leader of the Houston Java Users Group, and, he is a co-organizer of this code-camp style event. Over 1600 folks registered for this event. Approx 1/2 attended throughout the day. --- I gave (3) talks:

• "JavaFX II: Advanced features (pdf)" --- (One of the attendees had deep knowledge of JavaFX; he had a licensing question regarding the reuse of dtfx.js at his company)
• Build truly async. Web apps using Comet (pdf forthcoming) --- (There was interest in using a combination of Comet and JavaFX/Javascript; an interesting combination to solve a problem. Some of the Microsoft guys aked if Commet was available in .NET; Yes, ASP.NET has its own Cometd implementation. Talk went pretty well + lots of interested in Comet)
• JDK7 and Java EE6 (pdf) --- (Very Well Attended! Overall, people seemed to be quite excited about the Modularity feature)

Nonetheless, the conference seems to have some respect from developers due to its deep-down developer focus...". -- Thanks Sang

"....A sincere thank you to Sang Shin for coming out to this year’s HoustonTechfest (we had over 800 people in attendance). We wouldn’t have been as successful without him.....Thanks again Sang!!!... " --Dan Sline Houston JUG 9/29/09

[There was this] "...huge tension between those who advocated for the adoption of free software by Brazil and those who thought we should do the sameness of always, buying, paying for others inteligence[sic] and, thank God, prevailed in our country the issue and the decision of free software. We had to choose: or we were going to the kitchen to prepare this dish the way we wanted to eat, with the seasoning that we wanted, to give a Brazilian taste to our food, or we would eat what Microsoft wanted us to eat. Prevailed, simply, the idea of freedom...." -- President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brasil at FISL 10 2009 --- (english transcript of Lula's speech here)