For once, a presentation finished on time (maybe even a little early). Craig gave excellent coverage to a technical subject: Apache Bean Scripting Framework (BSF). I was impressed that he managed to keep BSF and BeanShell (one of the many languages supported by BSF) straight during his talk.
A few in the audience had worked with BSF. Konstantin hopped up and showed some XSLT performance tuning he achieved using BSF with Jython in Xalan XSLT. A nice alternative when Muenchian grouping blows your mind (or your stack).
After fielding some questions, Craig threw the stage open to anyone else. I mentioned that I am giving a talk on programming and multimedia for kids at an upcoming meeting of the Overland Park chapter of the Club of Scientific Hobbies (COSH). It will be Saturday, Feb. 21 at the Blue Valley Library.
Konstantin intrigued us with a new toolkit he's been using. Dynamator purports to be a better way to maintain server pages. Basically it uses the HTML 4.0 id attribute to find static text to replace with dynamic content. That way, your HTML designers can keep messing with the look-and-feel (as long as they don't change the ids). There is also support for replacing content without using the id attributes, but it doesn't work as well. The great thing about Dynamator is that it isn't a replacement for whatever server page technology you use. It will work with "any page generation technology, including JSP, XSL, ASP, PHP, Velocity, Cold Fusion, and Java."
A very informative night.
On the administrative side, we discussed our lack of a homepage. In the next day or so, our main pages www.kcjava.org and www.kcjpa.org should be pointing here. That should alleviate some pain. Not everyone is in love with the blog, however, so the wiki lives on. We would like to have a giant wiki company giving space away for free, but not everything can be paid for by the next dot.com bubble.
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