Raible Designs

New Colors (again)

I've just completed another round of re-working the colors and header images on this site. If you click on the different category headings (i.e. Java, Mac OS X or Open Source), you can see the other color schemes. If you like one of the category theme's better than the default one, let me know.

I also did some tweaks to get everything working in IE. What a pain in the ass that browser is. For some reason, if anything in the "main" part of the website (where the blog entries are) is too wide - IE shoves everything down the page, including the top nav bar and the right sidebar. It's so bad that a simple paragraph with "margin-left: 10px" doesn't work. With Firefox and Safari, it moves over properly and overlays the sidebar if that's what it takes. Because of this, there's a potential that wide posts in this site will make the sidebar drop to the bottom of the page. For the nav bar, I changed it to be absolutely positioned, so it should always be present.

Other IE issues include: 1) the calendar icon is a transparent .png (I'll probably have to change it to a .gif) and 2) the nav bar's "selected" items are up a pixel or two and contain a bottom border. While these are minor issues, I would like to figure out how to make IE more tolerant of item width's in the #main section. Let me know if you have any tips or tricks.

ADF Faces goes open source

It's likely you originally heard about ADF Faces being donated open source way back in December 2005. Looks like it's finally happened. It's going to be tough for Tapestry and Wicket to compete with JSF when big companies are providing components for it. The after-market for a web framework can certainly influence decision-makers.

AppFuse plans for the week

Like most Java open source projects, I hope to release a new version of AppFuse this week before JavaOne. There's a couple reasons for this: 1) so I have the latest and greatest to demo during talks and 2) so the article I'm writing is up-to-date. Unfortunately, with both AppFuse and Equinox it's a bit difficult to make sure I'm using the latest and greatest for everything. This is because they're both very thin layers on top of their underlying dependencies.

I'm willing to bet that a few of these dependencies will have new releases this week, as developers scramble to get a bunch of stuff done before JavaOne. Here's my release predictions for this week:

• Acegi Security 1.0
• DWR 2.0
• Hibernate 3.2
• Spring 2.0

My current plan is to fix outstanding issues for 1.9.2 and then hold off to do the release until this weekend. Hopefully that gives each project enough time to pump out a release. If you happen to be involved with any of the projects that AppFuse depends on - and you're not planning on releasing before JavaOne, please let me know.

The 1.9.2 release of AppFuse will (hopefully) be the last one in the 1.x series. Work on 2.0 will begin towards the end of this month. See the roadmap for the cool stuff coming in 2.0.

As far as the CSS Design Contest, I'll announce the winners tomorrow. I also plan to fix this site in IE tonight and take another stab at making the header images and colors easier on the eyes.

Livin' it up in NYC

I'll admit, this week has been exhausting. There's nothing like doing consulting 9-6 everyday for a client - especially when you're presenting or talking 90% of the time. My final presentation I delivered to the client was 600 slides. Yikes!

Even while this week was tough, I did manage to have a good time. I have a couple college buddies that live here, so they're always fun to hang out with. Wednesday night, we all met up at one guy's house for dinner and reminisced about the good ol' days. Last night, I hung out with my relatives from Beacon.

After finishing up with my client, I met my Aunt Mary in the lobby of the New Yorker Hotel. We walked outside, and when I started hailing a cab she said "What are you doing? I got a limo!" "WTF?!", I said out loud. I turned around to see Mary had brought my cousins along and they'd rented a limo for the night. Needless to say, we had a great time riding around, eating a fancy dinner and ended the night with champagne and cheesecake in Little Italy. It was truly awesome and definitely made my whole week.

Now I'm at the airport bar in Laguardia, sluggin' down a few before I head back to Denver. The next couple weeks are guaranteed to be hectic - I leave on Wednesday for the Ajax Experience, followed by JavaOne the week after. While traveling to clients isn't the most glamorous job in the world, getting paid to learn about Ajax/Java for two weeks in San Fransisco isn't a bad gig.

Studio7Designs

Andreas Viklund is the original designer of this site's layout. Last night he pointed out a cool new site that showcases another set of open source web design templates.

Aran and Pat, also known as open source template designers Nautica and snop, have launched a new and extremely pretty website: Studio7Designs.com. The site is announced as a "network of professional designers", and it will show off both open source website templates and stock photography. Pat is one of the designers whose work I truly admire (see the Lazy Days template to understand why) and Aran's Nautica-templates are great examples of the simple design style that I like, so the site is well worth a visit.

Like Andreas, I think their Lazy Days template is truly awesome. I wonder how hard it would be to port it to the CSS Framework?

Integrating Google Maps, Mule and ActiveMQ with AppFuse

Stephen Pasco has written a nice tutorial on how to integrate Google Maps, Mule and ActiveMQ with AppFuse.

Here's the scenario: Upon opening a Google map client, within a web browser, the user clicks on the map creating points (Figure 1). With each point created, a message is immediately sent to the ESB containing the point's longitude and latitude. A second, remote client instantly receives the sent longitude and latitude coordinates and displays them on a separate Google map (Figure 2). [Read More »]

Good stuff - thanks for the writeup Stephen!

Wireless in NYC

What's worse than staying at a high-priced hotel and having to pay for internet access? Staying at an old NYC hotel where the free (wireless) internet access doesn't work. Even worse, there's a plethora of available networks nearby. 2/3 of them are protected, and the rest simply don't work with my Mac. I'm starting to get pretty frustrated with the wireless on this MacBook Pro - especially since it worked nearly *every time* on my old PowerBook. I should probably take it into the Apple Store next week. The strange part is I can get a connection just fine at my client and Starbucks. It's weird staying in a hotel room and not having internet access - especially when traveling for business.

Update: Strangely enough - when I got back to my room tonight, there was a new wireless connection and I got a full/fast connection. Go figure.

CSS Design Contest: Time to Vote

It's time to vote for the CSS Framework Design Contest! Counting votes and making sure everyone only votes once is always a challenge in these types of contests. I think the best way to ensure honesty is to have people send an e-mail to a mailing list. So here's how to vote:

• Pick your favorite design from the entries.
• Post an e-mail to [email protected] with subject of "My CSS Design Contest Vote".
• Vote for your favorite theme by putting "My favorite theme is XXX" in your e-mail.

Let the voting begin!

Rebooted

As you can hopefully see, I've rebooted the HTML version of this site. I apologize to anyone using IE - I haven't even looked at the site using IE. Everytime I startup Parallels on my MacBook Pro, it locks up the system and I have to reboot. Installing this new theme was pretty painful, mostly because I had to do it with a 20K connection through my cell phone. I'm staying at The New Yorker Hotel in NYC, and even though they advertise "free wireless", it doesn't work for me.

I hope you like the new theme - clicking on the different categories will give you different variations of it. Clicking the "Roller" category will allow you to see version I'll be contributing back to the Roller project. If you see any issues at all, please let me know. Most of them should be fixable with a bit of CSS. The only thing I still need to do is figure out how to get Roller to use the last entry's title in the <title> tag. Google loves good titles.

Update: OK, so most people don't like the reboot - including folks on the CSS Reboot site. Personally, I like the new layout, but agree that the default colors need work. I do like some of the alternative colors, like The Web category's. I'm open to suggestions - what would you like this site to look like?

Update 2: The colors might suck, but my Sitescore results have gone up significantly. The funny thing is the main thing I'm lacking is different titles on each page.

Update 3: I solved the title problem. You can do this in your Roller templates too if you like.

#set( $xmap = $pageModel.getRecentWeblogEntries(1,'nil') )
#foreach( $day in $xmap.keySet() )
   #set( $recentEntries = $xmap.get($day) )
   #foreach ($var in $recentEntries)
       #set ($title = $var.title)
   #end
#end
    <title>#showWebsiteTitle() | #if ($page.Name == "Weblog") $title #else $page.Name #end</title>

Upgraded to Roller 2.2

I spent some time this afternoon and upgraded this site to the soon-to-be-released Roller 2.2 (release notes). Please let me know if you see any issues.

Upgrading Roller is the first step in preparing for tomorrow's CSS Reboot. I don't know if I'll have time to create a new theme and use it on this site, but I hope to give it a try. I'm on the plane for 4 hours tomorrow, so I should be get something done.

As part of the upgrade, I fixed search for this site. The problem was caused by using $dateFormatter when viewing search results. My guess is that variable is not in Velocity's context after searching.