What we've been up to......

It's been a while since we had our first meetup in March. But as a community group, we have achieved so much over the past few weeks. We have formed an executive committee consisting of 12 individuals who have volunteered to take up the responsibility of taking JAVA Colombo forward. We have launched our blog and started working on the sponsorship program. Just last week we had a very successful second meetup (expect a separate post regarding this soon). The following slide deck was presented at our second meetup. It summarizes what we have done and achieved up to this point.

JAVA Colombo - What We've Been Up To

-Hiranya Jayathilaka-

Senior Technical Lead - WSO2

JAVA Colombo Executive Committee Member

The JAVA Colombo Launch

The first meetup of the Colombo Java User Group [JUG] was held on 15th March @ WSO2 #58 office...

It was a huge success - we were able to get more than 70 to attend the event while around 180 registered for the Colombo JUG just with a one month notice...

I was in a panel discussion which talked about secure coding with Java - with Hiranya, Srinath and Amila..

Some key areas I would like to highlight here from what we focused during the panel discussion..

• Security concerns in application development - authentication, authorization, integrity, no-repudiation, confidentiality - best practices to follow while designing a login method -  exception shielding pattern.
• How does Java security architecture address the above concerns -  JAAS, JGSS, Java Security Manager.
• What are the security concerns in a distributed environment? 
• What are the common types of attacks? and solutions - attacks like, Cross-site Scripting, Session Hijacking, SQL Injection, Log Injection were demonstrated during the session...
• What are the security testing best practices?  - OWASP

After the panel - the brain storming session on 'Future of Java - Would Oracle kill Java ?" started...

It was quite interesting and was nicely moderated by Senaka.

Some key points highlighted during this session...

• Oracle may not kill Java - but will look in to more commercial side of it by giving patches only for paying customers.
• Oracle's response time so far for critical Java security bugs is highly satisfactory.
• People were afraid when Oracle acquired MySQL and they had all reasons to kill MySQL but they did not. Further Oracle has contributed to improve the performance of MySQL.
• What will happen to the J2ME? Most probably Android will kill J2ME.
• Java7 adaptation is still slow.
• No room for Java on iPad [iOS].

All-in-all it was nice couple of hours with Java enthusiasts...

Need to Thank everyone who contributed to the success of this event - specially WSO2, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Harindu, Hiranya and all other colleagues at WSO2.

Looking forward for the next Colombo JUG event sometime around late April...



Prabath Siriwardena
Senior Software Architect & Chair,
Management Committee
Integration Technologies at WSO2