Sweden Spring UG Birth of a new UG

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Once in a while we see a new user group being born. One of those is close to many Java programmers’ hearts – the Sweden Spring User Group.

We turned to Ulrik Sandberg, one of the founders of the group.

Tell us how you got started with the Sweden Spring User Group.
The Sweden Spring User Group was started in early 2007. I had spoken to Rod Johnson at The Spring Experience 2006 about creating a user group for Swedish users, and he thought that was an excellent idea. We decided to use Google Groups as the tool for collabo- ration. Jayway would be our financial backup, since we wanted to provide the group members with first-class confer- ence facilities, as well as food and drink.

Which are your goals?
Our primary goal is to gather all Swedish Spring users in a community, in order to get a forum where you can ask questions and present ideas to peo- ple who share the interest for Spring. We also want to provide high-quality sessions when we meet. The sessions should be held by the community, but we also aim to get an external speaker from either Interface21 or other inter- esting companies related to Spring.

What have you been doing so far?
The first meeting was held in late March, in Stockholm. We managed to get Arjen Poutsma from Interface21 to hold a session about Duck Typing in the Spring WebServices framework. Before that, there had been an Introduction to Spring and a session about the Aspect- Oriented Programming (AOP) support in Spring 2.0. It was very crowded, and people really enjoyed the short break for beer and pizza.
The second meeting in early July was also in Stockholm. The main speaker at that event was Ben Alex from Inter- face21, the inventor of Spring Security, previously known as Acegi Security. He had come all the way from Australia and held a session about his Real Object- Oriented (ROO) framework. There was also a session about Spring JDBC and a very interesting case study about the use of Spring MVC at PriceRunner.
The third meeting took place in Malmö in late September. The guest of honor was Jonas Bonér from Terracotta. He talked about how easy it is to clus- ter Java applications using Terracotta. There was a session about Spring and Mule, as well as a session about Declara- tive Caching Using Spring.

So what is your final message to the readers?
In short, the Sweden Spring User Group arranges high-quality mini-con- ferences about Spring and related tech- nologies four times a year. For free. You should join us.

Ulrik Sandberg, Björn Granvik

Ulrik Sandberg
Consultant at Jayway