Blog.Project13.pl

Today another Java User Group Meeting (more info) was held… This time at my university (AGH – University of Science and Technology). :-)

I wasn’t there from the beginning as I had some work to do, but I managed to get there after the “pizza-pause” and listen to:

• Miroslav Kopecky, talking about Matlab in Java (in English).

It was quite interesting to see how MatLab can be used in Java apps to make complex calculations really simple (well… let matlab do the for you basically). I like the idea of exporting plots from matlab directly to JavaScript, thus allowing nice WebApps with heavy math behind them (stock analysis etc.). That said, matlab is closed source as you propably know, and this makes it kinda sucky to develop J2SE apps based on it, as the enduser has to buy matlab anyways to use you program. A solution mentioned is getting 1 matlab license, put it on a server ane make your aplication a webapp – I agree that this is propably the best solution to avoid this “license hell” but it’s sad that there is no other license for endusers of procucts that use matlab as their math engine… Next up was:

• Łukasz Czerpak with the topic: “Swingowa aplikacja rozproszona dystrybuowana poprzez Java Web Start” (technologie: EJB3/JPA, Java Web Start, OpenEJB+Tomcat+Hibernate, Swing Application Framework). (whoa, that’s long)

He talked about his real live experience with an (banking) app that they “ported” to WebStart using GlassFish and then Tomcat+OpenEJB. A nice fact that I learned from this presentation was about how easy glassfish is. …and slow and big… JARs that a user needs to download from JavaWebStart are about 41MB, that’s a lot – since the app talked about was like 300KB. Tomcat on the otherhand is both quicker and smaller – there’s a little more to configure though – but I guess thats a small price to pay. Sadly he didn’t have time to say anything about Griffon which I’m a little interested in lately. It was quite interesting though… :-)

All in all, I liked it and will attend the next meeting in January – hope to be there from the start and not only halfway through as today. ;-)

PS: There was a sad ending for this day for me though. As I really didn’t want to miss even more of this meeting, and so I parked my car where it’s not allowed in order to save some time. When I came back to my car after the meeting my car’s wheel was “locked” (by the police) and got a ticket for wrong parking… So the free JavaCamp didn’t end up being so free for me… ;-)