Dave Nicolette with "Java on the Mainframe"

Welcome back to JC-JUG! Our February presenter will be Dave Nicolette.

About the speaker:

Dave Nicolette started his career in IT as a mainframe developer in 1977 and continued to focus on that platform until around 1992, when he shifted focus to Unix and emerging technologies. He has worked in a variety of roles in several industries. He became interested in the Agile movement in 2002, and became an agile coach in 2006. Recently he has become interested in bringing contemporary development practices back "home" to the mainframe world.

About the presentation:

People have been predicting the demise of the mainframe since the 1980s. Every year was to have been the year the mainframe was replaced by more cost-effective alternatives. Most of the world forgot about mainframes. Universities and technical schools stopped teaching the platform and its traditional languages. People wrote articles about using the Strangler pattern to replace legacy applications. Young professionals avoided learning Cobol and PL/I. Older professionals removed those languages from their resumes to avoid recruiter calls.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the cemetery. Large enterprises maintained their investment in the platform. IBM continued to advance the technology. At the same time, cloud computing gradually became a "thing." At first, cloud providers were able to offer pretty impressive services at reasonable cost. But as customer demand grew, so did the complexity of cloud environments and the cost of keeping them alive, safe from hackers, and reasonable to operate and use both logistically and financially.

In the past few years, the IBM mainframe, now branded as the zSeries, started to enjoy a resurgence in the market. The centralized platform already had all the features cloud infrastructure companies had discovered were necessary to support a robust cloud environment. No other system offers the security and scalability features of a zSeries. And IBM has been steadily adding support for all the familiar tools - Linux, VMs, containers, and the rest of it.

And the language IBM has bet their future on? It's Java.

Join us to learn a bit about zSeries architecture and how Java is implemented on that platform, as well as how IBM is positioning the zSeries and Java for the future. Also learn how the new generation of professionals who are working on the system are bringing enhanced tooling and contemporary good practices to the mainframe world, where Extreme Programming has been largely unknown until very recently.