A JBoss User Group (JBUG) is a group of people who share a common interest in JBoss technologies. They are organized and supported by the community and meet on a regular basis to discuss new technologies, development methodologies, interesting use cases, and other technical topics. The common goal is to provide education, help, and social events for the community and to promote open source. There are several JBUGs around the world and you can always start a new one in your local community.

JBUG Worldwide is like any other JBUG but the events will mostly take place virtually, using a Google Hangout. This allows us to reach to a broader set of audience, the presentations are recorded, and available for replay on the youtube channel. To our audience, it provides access to world-class speakers from Red Hat and rest of the JBoss community, which otherwise may not be easily accessible. This effort is initiated by JBUG Newcastle and so sometimes the meeting may coincide with a physical meeting at that JBUG.

You may find stark similarity with vJUG, and that is indeed true! However vJUG will continue to focus on broader Java topics and may feature some widely used JBoss technologies. But JBUG Worldwide will cover a wider range of JBoss technologies, and some of the niche ones as well.

The first session was on LiveOak: Is that a mobile backend as a service in your pocket ? and the recording is available:

Several other sessions are already lined up for this year, and more are in the pipeline:

• Code-driven introduction to Java EE 7 (Jun 17)
• What’s new in WildFly 8 ? (Jul 8)
• Testing the Enterprise layers, with Arquillian (Oct 21)
• Cast studies in Testable Java EE Development (Nov 18)

We would love hear to your feedback about speaker/topics, streamlining the process, or any thing else. We need you to make this successful!

Ping @Pfrobinson or myself (@arungupta) for any questions/comments.