Garden State Java User Group

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About us

The Garden State Java User Group, Inc. (formerly the ACGNJ Java Users Group), in continuous operation since February 2001, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides a forum to promote the use of Java platforms, APIs, and language. We strive to facilitate interactive discussions and exchange of ideas relating to the application of Java.

Topics will primarily focus on JVM technologies such as Java EE, Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, Spring, Groovy and Kotlin. Topics on non-JVM technologies such as Meteor, AngularJS, and Rust may occasionally be presented.

We are proud members of the MicroProfile Working Group and the Jakarta EE Ambassadors and have adopted the Jakarta NoSQL specification.

All meetings are generally held on the second Tuesday of the month, but may change due to speaker availability. In-person meetings are usually held at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. On-line meetings are held via our YouTube channel.

Upcoming events

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JakartaEE Specs to the Rescue -- and -- Augmenting AI with Jakarta EE
Wed, Sept 16 · 18:30 EDT
Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, Lancaster Rd, Madison, NJ 07940, USA, Madison, NJ, US
Please note that registration via EventBrite is required for in-person and on-line attendance.

We are pleased to announce that Gerrit Grunwald and Ivar Grimstad will be our special guests for the second (of two) meetings this month.

Prompt and Pray? JakartaEE Specs to the Rescue (Gerrit)

AI code generation is changing everything, and not always for the better. Every developer now has a tireless coding assistant that can produce hundreds of lines of Java in seconds. But code is cheap, software isn't.

AI generates what you describe, and if your description is vague, ad hoc, or tied to a specific framework version, the result will be too. In the enterprise, code written today must still be maintainable in five, ten, or fifteen years...by people who may not have been part of writing it. Framework lock-in, abandoned libraries, and undocumented conventions are already hard enough to manage without AI accelerating the problem.

But when you give AI a specification-based contract like Jakarta EE, the generated code is portable, standardised, and guaranteed to have a support path for the foreseeable future. We will build a complete Jakarta EE 11 application, live, one spec at a time, entirely with AI assistance, to prove the point.

Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE (Ivar)

Building production-grade AI requires more than a model. It requires an ecosystem. The Java Community provides this ecosystem for the modern enterprise. Paired with Jakarta EE, it creates a formidable platform for AI Augmentation.

Come to this session to learn how to orchestrate enterprise-ready AI agents using Jakarta EE technologies in combination with AI augmentation approaches, such as tools, skills, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Gerrit Grunwald

Gerrit Grunwald is a software engineer that loves coding for around 40 years already. He is a true believer in open source and has participated in popular projects like the JFXtras Project as well as his own projects (TilesFX, Medusa, Enzo, SteelSeries-Swing, SteelSeries-Canvas and JDKMon).

Gerrit regularly blogs at Harmonic Code and an active member of the Java community, where he founded and leads the Java User Group Münster (Germany). He is a JavaOne rockstar, a Java Champion and a speaker at conferences and user groups internationally and writes for several magazines.

Ivar Grimstad

Ivar Grimstad is the Jakarta EE Developer Advocate at the Eclipse Foundation. He is a Java Champion and JUG Leader based in Sweden.

Besides advocating the Jakarta EE technologies, Ivar is contributing to the Jakarta EE specifications as well as being the PMC Lead for Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J). He is also one of the specification leads for the Jakarta MVC specification and represents Eclipse Foundation in the JCP Executive Committee.

Ivar is also involved in MicroProfile, Apache NetBeans, and a wide range of other open-source projects and communities. He is a frequent speaker at International developer conferences.
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