Last night a small office on the west end of Princes Street was the venue for this months Scottish JUGS meeting. That's Java User Group if you've not heard of a JUG before. I hadn't. Apparently throughout Europe, and the world, there are hundereds of Java User groups with membership ranging from 15 in the case of Edinburgh to 30000 in Brazil. That's an impressive number of Java programmers.
The topic last night was Maven, with an introductory talk given by Andrew Williams. We covered the basics of what Maven is, what it can do for small groups and large companies and some basic demonstrations. It was really quite interesting and I think that Maven certainly would appeal to my OCD tendencies. There was some discussion about how difficult it is to start out with Maven as the although the documentation for the plugins is good it is difficult to know which plugs you need. While the optimum help documentation/system is still in the construction/argument stage we decided it would be best just to email Andy ...
The sponsers were Cirus, a webdesign company, which has some beautiful offices. The sponsors also provided much appreciated beer and nibbles! There were the usual tshirts, pens and software to give away, but I didn't get anything this time :(
Roll on the next Scottish JUGS meeting. The next meeting will be in August/September - a social in the pub. After that another talk/workshop/brainstorm - who knows. There's a free book and licence for some software for anyone who wants to do a presentation!
