In his excellent book The Invisible Computer, Donald Norman explains the computer changing from something you might have one of at home (a multi-purpose PC) to an unseen component in special-purpose devices from washing machines and refrigerators to portable telephones and music players. The same thing is happening with graphics software, and this article considers one specific example. Along the way, I also explain how to produce cat macros.

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Last week Stephane Epardaud and Nicolas Leroux, senior software developers at Lunatech Research, presented “Nouvelles technologies de développement en JEE” at the Forum des Professions Informatique 2008 in Nice.

The conference was organised by the University of Nice and it was rather pleasant to discuss with the students and other I.T. professionals. Thanks again for the invitations.

This is also the start of a new Open Source project that will be used as a show case for new technologies (JBoss Seam, JPA, EJB 3, Hibernate Search, etc…). The project is available here. We will try to write some nice tutorials and articles about it. More to come on this web, so keep posted.

In the meantime, you can download the presentation slides in French (PDF, 0.5 Mb).

You can send your comments nicolas+fip@lunatech.com.

We would like to invite you to our fourth Benelux JBoss User Group meeting: an afternoon of free technical sessions presented by JBoss developers.

The JBoss User Group is growing and even our last location is now too small, so once again we arranged something special: we will meet in the Staal Zaal in Rotterdam. i-Portal Rotterdam has kindly agreed to sponsor the event by providing us with a sumptuous room.

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Here are some photos from Friday’s Benelux JBoss User Group event at Paddy Murphy’s Irish Pub in Rotterdam. The event was a great success with around 60 attendees making this a relatively large JBoss User Group. (more…)

The third JBoss Benelux User Group event will be in Rotterdam, on 29 February 2008. This event will be a bit different: the JBoss User Group is growing and our previous meeting room has become too small, so we arranged something special this time: we will meet in Paddy Murphy’s Irish Pub in Rotterdam. Photos of the event are now on-line. (more…)

Here are a few photos from last week’s JBoss User Group event. (more…)

Since the first event was so much fun, Lunatech Research hosted the second JBoss Benelux User Group meeting on 2 November 2007, with a presentation by Bruno Georges. (more…)

One of Lunatech Ventures‘ cool investments at the moment is Eximion - next generation games on the web. Now that Eximion is ready for the prime time, it was interesting to talk to art director Chris van der Linden about the work behind the graphics, and how he has a huge catalogue of sketches that he made while developing ideas and game characters.

Chris’ blog is now starting to feature some of this artwork, which is stylish stuff. He may need to keep this up for some time if he is going to publish all twelve thousand images.

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer at Lunatech Research.

Although I generally avoid Amsterdam, I will be making an exception tomorrow to go to The 7th Amsterdam Java Meetup with Sam. It should be a good chance to meet some more Java developers who work in the Netherlands, and although De Jaren is hardly my favourite cafe-bar, at least it is big enough for the expected large crowd. I wonder if any of them would rather work in Rotterdam…

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer at Lunatech Research.

Who says gaming is all fun? Well, Eximion, one of our portfolio companies does. Those who thought Holland only produced tulips and wooden shoes should think again! Out of their converted student home, Eximion from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, have worked for two years on their ‘new style’ web game platform. Last week the covers were pulled off this labour of love… the Kalydo platform. (more…)