Raible Designs

2016 - A Year in Review

When I wrote my 2015 year in review blog post, I was certain my '66 VW Bus would finally be finished. AND IT IS! Do I need to even write this year's post? Yes, because I want to tell you how awesome it is to own this incredible-looking, awesomely-fast, mean machine.

But first, let's review the year using the following categories.

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
  • The Ski Bus (aka Stout)
  • The Porsche Bus (aka Hefe)
• 2017

Professional

I had two different clients in 2016: CA Technologies and Stormpath. I worked full-time for CA in January and February, helping them adopt AngularJS. To help them learn about Angular 2, I rewrote my AngularJS getting started and testing tutorials for Angular 2. The first versions were published at Getting Started with Angular 2 and Testing Angular 2 Applications. I refactored both tutorials to use Angular CLI in August and published Getting Started + Testing with Angular CLI and Angular 2 (RC5). Since then, I've been maintaining an up-to-date version on GitHub.

In April, I started working half-time for CA and half-time for Stormpath. For Stormpath, I worked on their Java SDK and helped them launch their Java SDK 1.0. I really enjoyed working with the team at Stormpath. This led to me think about my priorities in life. I realized that I wanted to work remotely, get paid to speak at conferences, and get paid to work on open source. Stormpath provided me with all of these opportunities and I started working full-time for them on September 26, 2016.

In May, I joined the board of the Denver Java User Group. I've been helping organize meetups, find speakers, and secure location sponsors. If you're interested in speaking at DJUG in 2017, please let me know!

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Abbie turns 14 today and she's celebrating in style. Her brave parents allowed her to have a slumber with all her friends. There's 11 teenage girls in our basement right now, screaming, giggling and making lots of loud noises.

I'm really proud of the young woman Abbie has become. She's a straight-A student and loves horseback riding and sleeping.

Trish and she bought a new horse a few weeks ago. His name is Tucker and they traveled to New Mexico to find him. He's a thoroughbred paint, with hunter jumper skills. We'd love to keep at the Raible Ranch, but we want to see what the winters are like first. For now, he's at Friends of Horses, which has an indoor arena. Next year, the girls plan to compete and hopefully bring home lots of trophies!

Happy 14th Birthday Abbie!

Life as an Open Source Developer

It's been a little over a month since I started my new gig at Stormpath. I gotta say, life is great as an open source developer! Yes, I did start working for them as a consultant in April, so it's not a huge change for me. However, I only recently realized I haven't written a single line of proprietary code the entire time. My GitHub contributions look pretty good this year. They're nothing like @mojavelinux, or @dsyer, but I'll get there.

It's also been a bit more stress than I'm used to. I think this comes from a couple things: 1) turning my hobby into my job and 2) I've set a lot of high expectations for myself. As a developer evangelist, I get to create my own job. That means I can speak at the conferences I want to, write the code I want to, create the blog posts I want to, and everything else in between.

At the end of September, I finished updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. It's gone through tech editing and it's being copy-edited right now. I hope to release it within a week.

In early October, I said I'd commit to writing one blog post per week, develop a JHipster module for Stormpath, and help get their Angular 2 support good enough for an alpha release. I'm happy to report I've been able to accomplish most of these and I hope to show off our Angular 2 support soon.

I then channeled my efforts into integrating Stormpath's Java SDK with their AngularJS directives. You can read about how I did that in Get Started with AngularJS, Spring Boot, and Stormpath. Unlike my previous AngularJS tutorial, this one connects to a backend and shows how to communicate with Spring Boot cross-domain.

If you like to read code more than words, you can look at the example project's commits on GitHub.

1. Create an AngularJS UI: search and edit features
2. Create a Spring Boot app with Stormpath: app from start.stormpath.io
3. Develop an API to CRUD people with Spring Data REST: /api/people
4. Integrate AngularJS and Spring Boot apps: cross-domain
5. Integrate Stormpath into AngularJS for login, registration and forgot password: Stormpath Angular SDK

Last week, I released a JHipster module that integrates Stormpath. This exercise was good because I was able to identify some gaps in Stormpath's SDKs and fix them. Getting something to work made me feel good; having the ability to improve the developer experience was even better! Of course, I blogged about what I learned.

This week, I edited and code reviewed some posts from Karl Penzhorn on React with Spring Boot and using webpack with React. I also got to bang my head against the wall writing Angular 2 tests. If you're writing a module for Angular 2, generator-angular2-module provides a nice starting point.

Last, but certainly not least, I'll be speaking at a few events about Microservices, JHipster, Angular 2 and Stormpath in the near feature.

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, November 19
• The Rich Web Experience, December 9
• A joint talk at Denver JUG with the infamous Josh Long, December 14

If you have any questions about developer evangelism, the technologies I mentioned in this post, or Stormpath, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you on the road soon!

Life Update: A Summer to Remember, a New House, and a Sweet New Gig

TL;DR: I had a super fun summer traveling with my family, recently moved to a new house in the country, and I've joined Stormpath as a Developer Evangelist. Wahoo!

I've written several "life update" posts in the past, but there's been few as epic as this one. When I wrote my 2016 Goals, I listed "July in Montana" as one of them. And y'all know that "finish the bus" was #1. Since the bus is done, I wanted to show it off in my hometown 4th of July parade in Condon, Montana.

A path to these goals became clear in mid-June, shortly after visiting London and Tallinn with my Mom. It involved a lot of driving, but I was determined to make it happen. I was so excited about my plan that I sent an email to my best friend, Owen, on June 15.

Getting Started + Testing with Angular CLI and Angular 2 (RC5)

I started creating Angular 2 applications when it was in beta (back in March). To keep up with Angular 2's changes, I wrote a tutorial about developing with RC1 in June. Earlier this month, RC5 was released and many things changed once again. I think Scott Davis sums it up nicely in a tweet.

To keep up with the rapid pace of change in Angular 2, I decided to write another tutorial, this time using Angular CLI. The biggest change I found since writing the last tutorial is testing infrastructure changes. Since Angular's Testing documentation hasn't been updated recently, hopefully this tutorial will help.

Upcoming Events: Devoxx4Kids Denver, Testing Angular 2, DevoxxUS CFP and VJUG24

It's been awhile since I've posted anything on this here blog. That usually means one thing - I've been off having fun! That couldn't be more true this summer. The day after my last post, I began traveling and haven't stopped since. In fact, this weekend will be the first weekend I've been home since writing that post. Hawaii, Montana, Denver, Montana, Colorado Springs and Utah - it's been a fabulous summer. I'll write more about those adventures soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to mention some upcoming events you might be interested in:

• September 10: Devoxx4Kids Denver has an upcoming workshop on Exploring JavaScript with the world famous Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. If you know Venkat, you know this is a session you shouldn't miss. Your kids will love it, you'll get a lot of good laughs and everyone is sure to have a good time. Make sure and RSVP soon so you get in before this baby fills up!
• August 22: HTML5 Denver has a sessions on ES6 vs. Typescript and Testing Angular 2 Applications. The first session will be delivered by my good friend Geoffrey Filippi and I'll be performing the second act with the help of angular-cli.
• September 1: One of my favorite conferences, Devoxx, is coming to the US! DevoxxUS recently announced that registration is open. Even more interesting is that the CFP begins September 1st. I'm biased because I'm on the program committee, but I'd love to see your ideas for great talks!
• September 27: Our good friends from vJUG are hosting the first 24 hour Virtual Java Conference in the world! I'll be speaking about the Art of Angular in 2016 at 10pm EDT.
• September: I'm looking for new clients. My current contracts end on August 31 and I'm searching for the next cool team to work with. My expertise: Java, JavaScript and I'm really good at CSS. This is a hard combination to find! LMK if you have a need.

I hope to see you at one of these events!

A Delightful Trip to Devoxx UK and GeekOut 2016

I had the pleasure of traveling to London, England and Tallin, Estonia this past week. In London, I spoke at Devoxx UK. In Tallin, I spoke at GeekOut. I took my mom (or mum, if you prefer) and we explored the sights, enjoyed local cuisines and savored a few beverages. Our trip started with a direct flight from Denver to London. We arrived on Tuesday, June 7, around noon.

We were only in London for two nights, but it was enough time for us to savor excellent Indian food, fancy a walk through London, and order a bow tie. I forgot the bow tie for my JHipster outfit. Luckily, I found a good replacement and was able to order it for next-day delivery. I had to order it by 5pm and the site declined both my credit cards with time running out. I ended up using PayPal and got my order placed in the nick of time: 16:59:51.

The big news announced at Devoxx UK is that Devoxx is coming to the United States in 2017! I'm on the program committee for this conference, so I look forward to helping make it spectacular.

Testing Angular 2.0 RC1 Applications

As mentioned on Friday, there's been quite a bit that's changed with Angular 2 between its Beta 9 and RC 1 releases. This article is an update to the Testing Angular 2 Applications I wrote in March. That tutorial was based on Angular 2.0 Beta 9. Rather than simply updating that tutorial and blog post for 2.0 RC1, I decided to create a new version for posterity's sake. The 2.0 Beta 9 version will remain on my blog and I've tagged the source on GitHub.

If you've already read the first version of Testing Angular 2 Applications, checkout the diff of the Asciidoctor version to see what's changed.

git clone https://github.com/mraible/angular2-tutorial.git
cd angular2-tutorial
git checkout testing-start
npm install

Getting Started with Angular 2.0 RC1

A few months ago, I wrote a tutorial on Getting Started with Angular 2. That tutorial was based on Angular 2.0.0 Beta 9. Rather than simply updating that tutorial and blog post for 2.0.0 RC1, I decided to create a new version for posterity's sake. The 2.0 Beta 9 version will remain on my blog and I've tagged the source on GitHub. This is an updated version of Getting Started with Angular 2, complete with the largely undocumented component router, and lazy-loaded components.

If you'd just like to see what's changed since the last release of this tutorial, you can view the pull request on GitHub. Note that I did sync my angular2-tutorial project with angular2-seed. This made it fairly easy to upgrade, believe it or not. My upgrade notes are in a gist. The best diff to read to see what changed is likely the diff of this tutorial.

git clone https://github.com/mgechev/angular2-seed.git angular2-tutorial
cd angular2-tutorial

Moving AppFuse into the Attic

In mid-February, I decided to stop working on AppFuse. My reason was simple: I was no longer getting any value from my contributions to the project. I sent a message to the developers mailing list the next day:

Hello everyone,

Last night, I started working on AppFuse 4.0, with the following features from the roadmap:

• Remove XML wherever possible
• Java 8
• Spring Boot
• Spring Data
• JSR 303 (might require removing or developing client-side support)

As I started removing XML and integrating Spring Boot and Spring Data, it quickly became apparent that it’d be a lot of work to make all of these changes. My guess is it’d take over 100 hours of my time to do everything. This is time I’d be taking away from my family and personal time.

At the end of last year, I wanted to make AppFuse 4.0 happen because I thought it’d help me stay up-to-date with Java technologies and learn some things along the way. As I dug into the codebase last night, I realized it’d be more of a headache than a learning experience. It seems there would be little reward for all the work.

Because there’s little-to-no activity on the mailing list these days, it seems like it’s the right time to shutdown the project and dedicate my free time to other open source endeavors. As you might know, I’m a big fan of JHipster (http://jhipster.github.io/). It combines AngularJS and Spring Boot and has all the features that AppFuse has - but with a more modern technology stack.

If we had everything hosted on GitHub, I think it’d make sense to add a line to the README that says “This project is no longer maintained”. However, since there’s a lot hosted on appfuse.org (with Confluence), it might not be that easy. Maybe it’s possible to export everything from Confluence to static HTML pages and host them somewhere with the same URLs so there’s not a bunch of 404s from shutting down the project.

Thank you for your contributions over the years. AppFuse was pretty cool back in the day, but now there’s better solutions.

Cheers,

Matt

The good news is I've worked out a deal with Contegix to keep appfuse.org up and running for the next year. The demos, documentation and bug tracker will be available until April 30, 2017. Bamboo and FishEye will be discontinued in the next week since they're too memory intensive for a smaller server. I'd love to figure out a way to export all the documentation from Confluence to Asciidoctor so everything can be on GitHub for years to come. However, there's something to be said for just letting a project fade away rather than holding onto nostalgic artifacts.

On a related note, Java.net will be closing in a year from today. AppFuse started on SourceForge, but moved to appfuse.java.net shortly after. Today, the only thing left on java.net are AppFuse's mailing lists. I suppose it makes sense that both projects will cease to exist around the same time.

AppFuse's source code will remain on GitHub. I have no plans to delete it.

Thanks to everyone that used and contributed to AppFuse over the years. It was a pretty wild and crazy ride from 2003-2007!