Vancouver Java Users Connect at TRIUMF

VanJUG members observing the new JavaEE 6 release at TRIUMF

Last week, TRIUMF hosted a meeting of VanJUG: no, not a club involving brewskies or Jaguar car owners, but the Vancouver Java Users Group.  Brian Leathem, who works as a Management-Information-System (MIS) Application Developer at TRIUMF, organized the event and invited Arun Gupta from Sun Microsystems to speak on the topic "What's new in JavaEE 6 and Glassfish V3" for the Vancouver Java Users Group (VanJUG) meeting, hosted at TRIUMF. In addition to the dozen members in attendance, including a few of TRIUMF's own MIS employees, a class from British Columbia Institute of Technology tuned into the meeting via WebEx, a tool used for web conferencing.

TRIUMF's MIS team writes and programs applications for the Administration, Human Resources, and shipping/receiving websites using Java. The team also manages MIS functionality for the science division, coordinating schedules for experiments.

VanJUG is a not-for-profit group which networks about 100 members in total from the local Vancouver-area. Typically, meetings are held about once a month at UBC's Robson Square campus and members will organize a presenter from a key organization or business to visit and discuss tools and techniques to extend attendees' knowledge of Java.

JavaEE 6 is the latest release of the Java (Enterprise Edition) application environment released December 10, 2009 making Tuesday's meeting at TRIUMF very relevant to Java users. Moreover, TRIUMF's MIS team runs applications using GlassFish (a Java EE application server which is a piece of software that serves Java applications through the internet), making the presentation especially pertinent to TRIUMF.

Alice Zhu, co-op student from the University of British Columbia, is working with the MIS team this term. "The presentation was really informative! I'm new to using JavaEE but the presenter was quite considerate of the audience and made me aware of the features, compatibility with other services and the advantages to using the program."

Before the meeting, attendees toured TRIUMF; the ATLAS Tier-1 Data Centre especially caught their attention as it is the largest academic computer in Canada. VanJUG members were quite impressed with the scope of the data storage, transmission, and access problem the Tier-1 Centre is designed to address: gigabit-per-second connections to the CERN laboratory in Switzerland for petabytes of data to be access by hundreds of scientists from Canada and around the world. 

 

-Melissa M. Baluk, Communications Assistant