The Fall conference season is upon us, and I am racing to finish my notes for four different shows that all have their deadlines at the end of this month. The first show is a new one, EclipseWorld, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan Monday-Wednesday next week. (August 29-31). The show seems to cover pretty much everything Eclipse related from RCP to SWT to TTPP to WST to ABCDEFG to WXYZ. I'll be delivering four sessions on XML Editing in Eclipse, Macifying SWT, Test Driven Development with Eclipse, and Static Code Analysis in Eclipse.
The next show I'll be at is Software Development Best Practices in Boston (September 26-29). As well as hosting a panel on next generation client side technologies I'll be talking about Effective XML, GUI Testing, JUnit 4, Testing XML, and User Interface Principles in API Design. The show is looking for a few more volunteers to man doors, distribute notes, and similar tasks. For each day a you volunteer you get to attend the conference for a day free, and most volunteer days involve nothing more strenuous than sitting in the back of the room listening to the presentation, and collecting eval forms at the end; so really, it's a nice way to attend the show for free.
Then it's back to New York October 15-16 for the kickoff event in a new Weekend with Experts series devoted to J2EE. I'm not much of a J2EE person, but I'll fake it by talking about Effective XML.
Staying in New York (I'm really glad to see so many shows coming to New York) November 1-3 will be the Software Test & Performance Conference at the Roosevelt Hotel. Here I'll talk about Testing XML and Measuring JUnit Code Coverage.
Then I'll be travelling to Los Angeles for the first time November 14-18 for STARWest 2005. I'll be teaching a one-day intro tutorial to JUnit designed for testers, and then talking about Testing XML again.
In December, there's a tentative trip planned to Antwerp, Belgium for Javapolis. Details still remain to be worked out but I'll probably be talking about XML related subjects.
Moving even further out, next year I'll definitely be at Software Development 2006 West, March 13-17, 2006, in Santa Clara once again. I'm on the advisory board for that show and we're just starting to pick next year's sessions, but it looks like it's going to be really hot. In particular, it looks like there'll be a lot of AJAX, scripting, and web app content in addition to the usual batch of Java, C++, .NET, XML, and Testing. Plus I'm expecting to host the world's first ever 6:00 A.M. BoF.
If there are any other shows you'd like to see me at, just drop me a line or ask the show organizers to recruit me. (Believe it or not they really do read the evaluation forms you fill out at the end of every session, and if you ask for particular speakers, they will notice.) I also talk to user groups if travel expenses can be covered and they're not too far from New York City, or if they can be scheduled in conjunction with a show I'm already attending. (Contrary to popular belief, publishers do not have unlimited budgets for author tours. In fact, for midlist computer book authors, they tend to have no such budget at all. :-) ) I also do occasional corporate training on XML, test driven development, and Java.
Laid out like that, it looks like quite a lot. It always seems more doable when I'm signing up for these shows and don't have four simultaneous deadlines staring down my throat. :-) But it's usually a good time, and I hope to meet some of you there.
Since I'm thinking about conferences today (and avoiding working on my notes) I've also made some updates to the conferences page. I'm thinking the next update will move this page to pure XML styled with an XSLT stylesheet. No server side transformation. I'm just going to send this straight to the browsers. Apologies to Opera users, but it really is time for Opera to join the 21st century and support client side XSLT, Håkon Wium Lie's CSS wizardry notwithstanding. I was looking at what I have to do every time I want to make a simple update to the tradeshows page, and it's just way too complex to manually edit and sort the HTML. More often than not I make silly mistakes, and I certainly don't update the page as often as I should. I really see two options here:
Michael B. Allen has posted jCIFS 1.2.3,
a free (LGPL) SMB client library written in pure Java. It
supports Unicode, named pipes, batching, multiplexing I/O of threaded callers, encrypted authentication, full transactions, domain/workgroup/host/share/file enumeration, NetBIOS sockets and name services, the smb:// URL protocol handler, RAP calls, and more. The API is similar to
java.io.File. Version 1.2.3 adds
DCE/RPC pipes support, fixes bugs, and improves speed.