We are proud and excited to announce that Michael Nygard will be presenting to the Java Users Group at 6:00 pm on August 27th, 2008. Michael is the acclaimed author of Release It! and Java Developer’s Reference. He will be giving a two part talk on “Failure Comes in Flavors“, a topic derived from his book, Release It!. Please note that this is a language agnostic topic - all language enthusiasts are encouraged to attend!

We will be giving away 10 copies of Release It! and, as always, we will have refreshments and snacks.

If you are going to be in Charleston or wish to make the trip, I strongly encourage you to join us as this is a great opportunity to hear an industry expert in person.

A couple important announcements:

1. Benefitfocus has agreed to become the sole sponsor for the Charleston SC JUG. This has a couple key benefits:
   1. We can now pay a nominal fee for group members who volunteer to present. This fee will be negotiable on a per speaker basis.
   2. We now have a set budget to pull from. Since BF is maintaining ownership of these funds it makes maintenance of the JUG simpler, allowing more administrative time to be shifted to other things, like finding top-notch speakers.
2. The forum is gone.
3. I have added a mailing list plug-in. Click on the link in the top menu to sign up. Once you sign up you will get an email version of each post to the blog.

Our last meeting went great! Bryan Gilbert gave a talk on Struts 2. We have shifted the balance of members so that it is now only about 50% Benefitfocus employees with the rest being from Automated Trading Desk, Blackbaud, and others. This is a great thing and shows that we are really starting to grow throughout the community!

During the last meeting I announced a couple important things:

1. The group project is now off the table unless someone steps up and takes the lead on it. I don’t have time to manage a group project and the JUG so if this is something the group is really wanting then we need to find someone to lead it. Unless I hear something from one of the members the idea will die here.

2. The bulletin board is going away. Nobody uses it so I see little point in me trying to maintain it.

I’ll have some more exciting info about the group very soon. Stay tuned!