Genova Java User Group

We are happy to announce that the talk slides and demo screencasts, together with a full report of the event are online on the http://www.ideday.org website. A transcript of the final panel on the future of Java IDEs, as well as a photo gallery are also available.

(Per un resoconto in Italiano, vedi http://www.giampierogranatella.com/blog).

When last year Fabrizio Giudici “threw” the idea of organizing a follow-up to the very successful IDE shootout organized by the Cologne JUG, we were enthusiastic at first, then we took some time to evaluate the whole thing since our JUG is quite small… even if, on paper, the Genova JUG dates back to several years ago, it had become no more than a low participation mailing list until a new group of participants brought it back to activity in the beginning of 2007.

But the idea was fascinating, and so we decided to take this challenge… together with JUG Roma, which also was interested by the proposal, we invited representatives from the four major IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, JDeveloper); everyone was very interested and supportive, although, unfortunately, Eclipse was unable to participate because it was already involved in other events (including, obviously, EclipseCon) in the same period.

We decided that the event had to be less than a “confrontation” of the IDEs and more of a community event, where experts, developers and students could discuss the innovation and the future of Java development tools.

I think that this idea did resonate in many places, since we received significant (and absolutely necessary) support in organizing the IDE day not only from Sun, Oracle and JetBrains, from the Faculties of Engineering of Genova and Rome Universities, but also from the Open-Lab student association and O’Reilly UK.

Moreover, a number of local companies active in the Java development, traning and consulting areas were happy to support the event by offering a coffee break and, more importantly, by promoting the Java IDE Day among their employees and contacts: Eptamedia, Finsa Consulting, ManyDesigns, NIS and K-Tech.

The IDE day took place in Genova on the 10th of March and in Rome the following 12th. It definitely was a success: more than 200 developers attended it overall (130 in Genova and 70 in Rome). Beside the number, a positive result has been that everyone could appreciate three very interesting speakers showing not just very high quality technical content but more significantly, a lot of collaboration between them.

The talk slides and demo screencasts, together with a full report of the event are online on the http://www.ideday.org website. This report is in English and more focused on the Genova event; for more information on the Rome event you can visit Report on javaportal.it (in Italian). For a first-hand report in Italian see http://www.giampierogranatella.com/blog.

A transcript of the final panel on the future of Java IDEs, as well as a photo gallery are also available.

A big thank you again to all people and organizations who made the IDE Day a success, and particularly to Paolo, Angelo, Alessandro, Giampiero, Corrado A, Corrado L, Fabio, Fabrizio, Mara, Giorgio, and Carlo.