Last year, only 1% of attendees at Devoxx were women . This year, Devoxx addressed the issue in a panel entitled "Why We Should Target Women." On the panel were Kim Ross, Regina ten Bruggencate, Trisha Gee, Antonio Goncalves and Claude Falguiere. The moderator was Martijn Verburg. The discussion focused on how to attract women to programming and how to get current women programmers to be more active in the community. The panelists agreed that the IT field should not just attract more women but also men of different ethnic backgrounds. The lack of women in programming is in part a cultural issue that differs from region to region. In developed countries, very few women work as programmers whereas in Brazil and India a lot of women pursue careers in IT. Women in developed countries perceive the field as isolating and very few young women graduate in computer science. This perception of isolation was based in reality decades ago, but that is no longer the case today. Main ideas discussed by the panel: - Parents should encourage their daughters to play with Lego and learn programming - More organizations should target girls in high schools and young women in university to expose them to programming. Duchess organization is planning on being more involved with young girl events and mentoring. - Women tend to be more self-critical about their skills and are intimidated by high skill requirements in job advertisements. Companies should change job advertisements to get more women to interviews. - Panelists don't recommend affirmative action because women feel favored and lose credibility. They want to be judged for their skills. - Panelists recommend acting the same way when dealing with either female or male co-workers and managers - Women need mentors (men or women) to learn to become speakers at conferences and to promote themselves better - Men should be sensitive to the fact that women are alone at work to respond to men teasing. The balance of power at work is different from a social setting. - Men also experience discrimination on the job. It is more difficult for men to take time off when their children are sick, for example. Equal valuing of parental obligations could result in equal pay for women. See also: Trisha Gee Blog - http://mechanitis.blogspot.com/ Duchess Organization - http://www.jduchess.org/

Please prepare some unfair, critical, unconstructive and heretical questions about Java EE 6/7. I would like to answer them all with code and explain you why I like Java EE and believe why it is the most productive platform currently available. See you at 01.12.2011, 7 PM in JUG Augsburg!. *NEW* Real World Java EE Night Hacks - Dissecting Best Practices ...and the bestseller Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

HTML5 is a draft specification for the next major iteration of HTML. It represents a break from its predecessors, HTML4 and XHTML. Some elements have been removed and it is no longer based on SGML, an older standard for document markup. HTML5 also has more allowances for incorrect syntax than were present in HTML4. It has rules for parsing to allow different browsers to display the same incorrectly formatted document in the same fashion. There are many notable additions to HTML, such as native drawing support and audiovisual elements. In this excerpt, we discuss the features added by HTML5 and the associated JavaScript APIs.

After my last post on Java Lock Implementations, I got a lot of good feedback about my results and micro-benchmark design approach. As a result I now understand JVM warmup, On Stack Replacement (OSR) and Biased Locking somewhat better than before. Special thanks to Dave Dice from Oracle, and Cliff Click & Gil Tene from Azul, for their very useful feedback. ...