Reading through JavaLobby the other day I came across this article discussing JUG attendance. They discussed a poll that concluded that most Java developers don’t regularly attend JUGs. This wasn’t a big surprise to me; my observation is that many developers are interested in getting their jobs done and not much beyond that. Also, these meetings do occur after work and can take significant effort to attend, especially for those with families to take care of.

One of the complaints raised is that these meetings can become advertisements for vendors pushing their wares. As someone who has attended JUGs often in the past and who presents at many JUGs in the present (on behalf of a well known vendor), I can understand the balance that has to be struck. Developers that take the time to attend these meetings want to learn new and interesting things and generally don’t want to sit through a product pitch. At the same time, the vendors sending people to talk at these meetings are footing the bill to sponsor the meeting and would expect at least a mention of the product(s) in order to gain name recognition among the target demographic.

It is for this reason that we try to make our user group presentations not just about Oracle Coherence. We are happy to discuss a range of topics that help applications to scale, such as techniques to avoid XA using idempotent operations, or choosing the right data access strategy (ORM, JDBC, etc), or optimizing serialization. Creating an awareness of the scalability challenges that developers and architects face today is one of the key themes of our presentations. It is certainly my goal (and hope) that our user group presentations provide a valuable learning experience that is worthwhile for the developer community.