• 04/12/01: Proposal cited on-line "design competitions" as a powerful training aid. Timing has slipped, but the core ideas persist.
• 08/06/01: History shows the Web Apps team has been busy ever since, planning and coding needed capabilities via technical Projects.
• 08/15/01: Trade Show design plans foreshadow a great new place to host and/or watch design competitions held among MESDA's MEMBERS
• 09/06/01: Online forums help new virtual groups plan Trade Show software and events, and provide training aids needed by booth managers.
• 09/30/01: Beta Tests begin on feature sets planned for late this year. Additional booth options will tap recently announced J2EE 1.3 standards.

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  After non-trivial debates, MJP resolved itself in October into one Projects WG, with three sub-teams - jug, web app, and ejb-db - each led by its own JUG manager. Then web apps entered a special era, when we partnered with MESDA, MTI, and several local technology vendors to build a VTS-style portal web app which offered Java shareware to help on networking.

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• 12/07/01: Seed Funding A seed grant from MTI let Shadowcats expand its beta testing to add a lobby and other business-level support, including online training, project management, and support for XSLT.
• 01/01/02: Expansion Gradually, this JUG project has grown into an ongoing, multi-site community effort which mixes working groups, user groups, member firms, and other MESDA supporters.
• 02/15/02: Pre-releases(s) Thanks to MainelyWeb, this project now uses new hardware and Tomcat 3.2. Planned upgrades to TomCat 4.0 and other new infrastructure are being discussed.
• 04/10/02: New Projects Showcase It's taken a year, but we finally have a web site able to properly host Java showcase competitions, MJP webapps, and utilities for MESDA's working groups.

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  Disaster. Our promised host site severely qualifies its offer on a server - no new TomCat upgrades. The jug core could run fine on its already-obsolete Tomcat 2.2 version, but this was unacceptable to other active projects like JSTL, so VTS code moved again, to Dan's Shadowcats domain.

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• 06/27/02: Projects Staging Server Web apps decides VTS 2.0 beta testing by MJP can support on-line project management and demos for included web apps. This adds new VTS options like the guestbook page (was Jugnews). MJP overall gets its own private entry point above.
• 01/22/03: Exhibit Web App Early portlet experiments turned Jason's Survey idea into a useable voting app, which included future meeting topics pages inside portal pages.
• 03/05/03: Bridge Education Server Almost a year after we lost a real VTS/JUG host, Bridge Education steps up with a server offer. At this point, projects were advancing (very slowly) at two main domains: Shadowcats and Sourceforge.
• 05/30/03: Server Config Dominates We spent MJP email and a JUG meeting discussing specs, standards, and plans. Projects work slowed for the summer, then failed to rebound normally in the fall.

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  Now in our third year without a normal host machine, MJP interest waning badly. We also shifted MJP meetings from lunch time to just before JUG meetings (which never worked well). Progress was made on jugtopics and meetings, but little else until our new server actually started to run.

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• 04/16/04: Bridge Server Up? Finally, MaineJug is kicking bugs out of a server, and a new "Web Dev" working group headed by David and Craig starts trying to get an upgraded MaineJug.org domain working.
• 06/30/04: JUG Meeting Reviews MaineJug hears the latest news from its working groups, and we all start looking forward to moving old web apps onto the new host, and/or adding new things that are more interesting.

The showcase (Trade Show) web app can persist as is, or may evolve further as a portal for Special Interests Groups in and outside MESDA. Either way, an exhibit portlet or any web app can feed it content. That is how the VTS will grow - by including new (web app) page components into its pages.

Helping each booth (mini-site) to develop itself could be fun. Competitions can add a motive and audience that makes it more exciting, and also create new examples of booth improvements which guide and inspire others. This synergy lets the Trade Show be a forum for educating each MEMBER's staff, as well as a way to promote their employer -- its ostensible purpose. Maine's student groups can get involved too, either by enhancing the booth of any willing sponsor, or by filling up a special "demo" booth meant to show off their competitive designs.

1. Plan and arrange training programs for booth managers - the SIG's intended clients and members. Initially, this involves online forums, meetings with experts, usage documentation, manager-only "demo" booths, and other aids common to modern software user groups. Later on, these training programs will expand as needed to aid student groups as well.
2. Implement effective ways to capture design feedback and Q/A reports for the developers of the Trade Show site infrastructure. Early R&D on all of its central parts should be heavily directed by early end-user comments. In this case, that means reactions from beta-release booth managers. The public - and even most Mesda MEMBERS - won't show up until Spring.
3. Create formal web site refinement plans based on such design feedback, including formal business plans which let local developers supply additional options, and which define an adequate operations budget for manager training on all future site and booth enhancements. Again, training beta-release booth managers is just a warmup to training students of all types later on.
4. Arrange early (quiet, beta) design competitions among willing booths, for fun and profit, to explore how they'd work best later on larger scales. The "profit" here is mostly the experience of creating an online competition, plus the example booth enhancements which they generate. Contests may involve any relevant area of web design - layout, graphics, custom JSPs, SOAP services, XSLT or Filter demos, "semantic" metadata, etc.
5. Develop plans (or contests) to get professional training staffs active in relevant areas of booth design. This should tap not only commercial firms, but (as soon as possible) colleges. Once faculty starts seeing booths as handy online laboratories, essentially free, students will start doing small projects in them, and that gets everybody more quickly into the game.

To join this effort, help publicize it, or better yet, help lead it, RSVP.