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Popped along to the London Java Meetup last night, which took place at Smiths of Smithfield in Farringdon. I used to work in this area for a couple of years (our office was just opposite the market) and it was nice being back on a warm summer evening. It's kind of sandwiched between the West End and the City, being fairly chilled out as a result.

Anyway, it was a good night. Turnout was pretty good, with a nice mix of regulars and newbies. Some interesting discussion (over a beer, of course) about Java 5 and how it's still not been adopted by many companies. We're getting there, but it's hard to upgrade when you're running an application server that is only supported under earlier JVMs. Jez had the Java 5 in a Nutshell guide with him, which we agreed was now one damn large nut! At over 1000 pages it's huge. Somebody commented that J2EE was complex, at which point I replied, "have you seen the size of the Java API!".

Other than that, there was just lots of chatting about random technical (and non-technical) stuff. Unsurprisingly, some laptops made an appearance, started by Jez getting out his PowerBook to demo Chuckie Egg (written in Java 2D).

Sometime later and another appeared! I resisted making it a trio. :-)

Thanks for a good night guys - see you next month.