Raible Designs

gotAPI.com - an API Lookup Service

A friend just IM'ed me a link to gotAPI.com. This is a very cool site that allows you to lookup API information on practically everything I use: HTML, CSS, Java, Spring, Ant. Definitely a good bookmark to have.

Run Windows XP on your Mac Book Pro

I have to admit, it's pretty cool to see Apple's BootCamp. This software allows you to install/boot Windows XP on a MacBook Pro. I'm intrigued by the thought of doing this. I'd love to use WAPT, Beyond Compare, TopStyle and HomeSite on my laptop.

However, I realize that the process of installing BootCamp would probably take up the whole day - and after 2 days, I'd never use boot into Windows again. It's just easier to use my Windows box when I need Windows stuff. The thing I am interested in is running Windows XP on my Mac using VMWare. Then I don't have to reboot the whole machine just to do some CSS tweaking with TopStyle.

What happened to the design?

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information. Good idea - let's watch the web get ugly.

Busy Weekend

I was planning on taking this weekend off to let my left arm heal a bit. Furthermore, Julie and Holly headed up to Steamboat for some skiing and it was "Daddy Weekend". While the kids and I had a lot of fun, I was unable to overcome my addiction to work.

Saturday night I finally managed to get AppFuse running under CruiseControl. Previously, I'd always run into OOM exceptions before the 10-12 minute process of testing a particular flavor. This seems to be due to Ant and the copying of 700 files 3-4 times makes it run out of memory. For each web framework, the basic install is tested, then tested again with AppGen, and finally iBATIS is installed and tested. While the tests all run and report pass/failed correctly, the memory is so close to being maxed that e-mail cannot be sent, and half the time the webapp isn't viewable. Nevertheless, the process keeps on humming. To see the build status for each different AppFuse flavor, see http://home.raibledesigns.com:8080. Having you all click on this link should crash CruiseControl for sure.

Last night, I got caught up with working on the appfuse.org website. Rather than having a splash page, I changed it to use frames to wrap the java.net homepage, as well as other AppFuse sites. The top navigation should allow you to navigate to java.net, the wiki, demos and JIRA w/o having to type in new URLs. The fun part of this exercise was using CSS to hide images and compress the standard java.net header. If you'd like to do this for your java.net project, add the following to your www/project_tools.html page:

<style type="text/css">
    .topline, .topbar { border: 0 }
    #banner { height: 0px }
    #banner img { display: none; }
</style>

This week should be a pretty good one. I'm working full-time on finishing up AppFuse 1.9.1, and I hope to have it released before this weekend. My parents are coming into town on Thursday night, so that's my deadline. If I don't have everything done by then, I'll probably release anyway. For the full plan of attack for 1.9.1, please see The road to 1.9.1.

If I can finish the AppFuse release this week, I can work on Spring Live next week. After that, I'm booked up with client work for quite some time. So wish me luck, I'll be burning the midnight oil most of this week.

Finally, it was nice to see that many of you bought into my April Fools joke. While it wasn't as good as last year, I still had fun writing it. As some noted, it's not that unbelievable. However, the part about me dropping something for another is out of character. I changed my major 3 times in college, but never dropped the previous ones. For the record, I like Rails and I've been promoting it at Virtuas and SourceBeat. We've talked about starting a Rails practice, but (to be honest) haven't seen a whole lot of demand from clients. Hopefully that will change in the future and virtuas.com/rails will get filled in.

Done with AppFuse, moving to Ruby on Rails

For the last few weeks, I've been building an application with Ruby on Rails. While I enjoy its simplicity and the ability to get things done quickly, the thing I really like is there's a whole team of developers supporting this framework. If I develop an application with AppFuse, chances are I'll find a bug or two, and then I'll have to spend additional time that night fixing it. Furthermore, I'm beginning to loath the compile/deploy cycle that AppFuse requires you to do.

As a result of my experience with Rails, and my decision to use it for all future web development, it makes no sense for me to keep maintaining AppFuse. Virtuas has decided to start a Rails Practice and I'm going to be the Practice Leader for it. In addition, I'll be writing a "Rails Live" book for SourceBeat. Hopefully we'll have an ERP out for that by the end of this summer.

If you live near Denver, have a lot of experience with Spring, and are interested in becoming the Spring Practice Leader for Virtuas, please let me know.

Tapestry 4.0 support in AppFuse's CVS

I spent the last couple of days upgrading AppFuse from Tapestry 3.0.3 to Tapestry 4.0.1. While the integration isn't as clean as I'd like it to be, everything works and all tests pass, so that's good. I did post a few remaining issues to the Tapestry mailing list, but there's nothing major. While the upgrade was frustrating (it took me 4 hours to figure out I needed "validators" instead of "validator"), I feel I know a fair bit more about Tapestry now. Furthermore, my experience on the Tapestry user mailing list was incredible. Yesterday, for every question I'd send, I'd get 2-3 replies in a matter of minutes. It was like having my own personal Tapestry consultant by my side. It goes to show that Tapestry is a thriving community, with a lot of folks willing to help out. Thanks guys - I really appreciate the help.

Update: You can view the FishEye Changelog to see what the upgrade entailed.

Carpal Tunnel

Every month or so, after working a long-ass week, my left arm usually starts hurting as if I have carpal tunnel. Usually, I go get a massage and it feels better the next day, or a few days shortly after. The Massage Therapist always asks me if I've been diagnosed with carpal tunnel, to which I reply "No." They also ask me if I have tingling in my hands or forearms, and I always tell them "No, I just get a dull pain in my forearms when I work a long week." So I've never really had carpal tunnel AFAIK, just symptoms every month or so.

That all changed this week. I started noticing the dull pain in my left forearm at TSSJS, and I started noticing the tingling in my left hand yesterday. I've never had tingling before. Furthermore, last week was a pretty light typing week (but I might've played cards too much ). So now I'm worried; I'll probably get a massage this week and I have a chiropractor appointment next week. The only think I can think of that might be causing the tingling is: 1) riding my bike to work, or 2) the cheap-ass crappy keyboard I have at work.

I went to the Apple Store and CompUSA to get an ergonomic keyboard tonight, but had no luck. The Apple Store only sell the standard Apple keyboard and CompUSA only sells black Microsoft keyboards. The M$ keyboard's will work, but it seems wrong to hookup a Microsoft keyboard to a MacBook Pro with a cinema display. I have a meeting in South Denver tomorrow morning, so I'm going to stop by Micro Center. Hopefully they'll have something good.

Carpal Tunnel is a scary thing as a programming professional. It's one of the few things that can put you out of commission as a programmer. It looks like I'd better start taking it seriously if I want to keep slingin' code for the next 10 years.

Related: Carpal Tunnel in May 2004.

A Week Later: I went to a repetitive motion specialist yesterday. They said that hand surgeons hate them b/c they can solve most issues. They worked my left arm and hand, and expect everything to be better with a couple more treatments. It already feels a lot better, but I'm also doing stretches every hour - which helps a lot too.

css.appfuse.org

It's almost the end of March and we've only received a couple entries for the CSS Framework Design Contest. In an effort to show what contest entries look like, I've developed and deployed an application to http://css.appfuse.org (login as an administrator with mraible/tomcat). This application utilizes the CSS Framework and has a few themes packaged with it. In addition, you can set it to use an external stylesheet to make development easier. The default theme and selectable themes are pretty ugly right now, so don't get your hopes up. The good news is this is a work-in-progress, so hopefully it'll get better soon.

The theme setup I'd like to use in AppFuse relies on loading a default.css from styles/themes/<theme name>. I've designated styles/default.css as a place to import the css-framework files, as well as specify rules for all themes. I'm open to alternative suggestions, but I think this is a good start.

I hope to evolve this application, along with the CSS Framework Design submissions to show what's possible with CSS in web applications - as well as provide a repository of downloadable themes. It's likely we won't ship the "CSS Selector" logic with AppFuse, but it should be easy to install one of these themes in your AppFuse-based application.

You'll notice that the themes currently available aren't working that well. I'm working with the authors to see what I need to fix. It's probably related to how I have things setup in the application. One of the things I discovered in this exercise is that CoolMenus isn't very CSS-friendly. It requires you modify JavaScript to change its positioning. I've left the menu in place for now, but I hope to replace it in the next few weeks with a more CSS-friendly version.

Since we've only received two theme submissions for the CSS Design Contest, I'm going to extend it to the end of April. Hopefully css.appfuse.org will encourage more participation. Any thoughts, comments or bug reports are most welcome.

Back from Vegas

This weekend was one of my smoothest returns from Vegas in my life. It probably helped that Julie joined me there on Friday and we flew back together on Saturday. My BOF on Friday night was very well received and I heard a lot of positive comments about it afterwards. What do you expect when you give people free beer.

After the BOF, the Virtuas Crew had a kick-ass dinner at BOA Steakhouse in Caesar's. Before we were done, a college buddy of mine arrived in Vegas, so Julie and I met him at Harrah's for some blackjack and craps. We had an fun night of gambling with my buddy, who started with $5K at the first blackjack table. Apparently, Julie brought him luck and he ended up winning a few grand by the time the night was over. We had breakfast and walked back to Caesar's as the sun was coming up. We saw Gier and Hani catching cabs as we were walking in. 5 hours later, we'd had a good night's sleep and headed to the airport. We got sidetracked at Emeril's for lunch and enjoyed some good laughs with a couple friends before leaving.

When we got home last night, both kids had just fallen asleep. Of course, we wanted to wake them up, but also realized that sleeping children is quite a blessing. They were tickled to death when they woke up this morning and we were home. Today was a great day, and a big reason why it was so easy to transition from Vegas to Denver. The kids and I let Julie sleep in a little and took a stroller ride to the local bagel shop (a mere 3 blocks away) for a couple hours. It was a windy walk and we arrived home motivated to do some kite-flying at the park. We had fun at the park and it was super cute watching Abbie fly her first kite. After that, we headed to Dave & Buster's for lunch. Abbie never let me sit down because she wanted to play games the whole time. 2 hours later, we were on our way back home.

The day ended with Jack and I running errands. I needed to buy a new laptop backpack since mine got shredded in the wash a couple of weeks ago. We headed to Gart Sports, where I shopped and Jack stabbed stuff with a tent stake he found. He was like a hunter on the loose, crouching, jumping and yelling at stuff throughout the corner of the store we were in. It's a good thing no one else was around.

I ended up with the only backpack that could fit my laptop, which seems quite strange. I've been to the Apple Store, REI and Gart Sports and I've found the laptop backpack situation is abysmal. A couple of years ago, the selection was quite good. Oh well, I only paid $35 and I'll probably look for one online this week. The ideal backpack would have a built-in camelback and laptop holder (since I use it primarily when commuting on my bike).

After Garts, we headed to the Apple Store in Cherry Creek. I had to buy a new power cord for my MacBook Pro. I left mine in Vegas, possibly at the BOF. The Apple Store is pretty close to the "breakfast playground" - so I had to let Jack play in it. 15 minutes of jumping on eggs, waffles, climbing on bananas and sliding down bacon made Jack a very happy camper.

It's great to be home. AFAIK, I'm not travelling for a couple weeks, possibly more than a month. My next big trip is to The Ajax Experience and JavaOne in May. This week is supposed to be in the 60s, so I'm looking forward to a nice week of Colorado spring weather. With any luck, I'll get a signification amount done on both AppFuse and Spring Live this week. It might take a couple of late nights to make it happen, but I feel pretty motivated right now.

[TSSJS] Java Web Frameworks Sweet Spots BOF

I've finished composing my "Java Web Framework Sweet Spots" document and presentation for tonight's BOF at TSSJS. Unfortunately, the BOF is at 6:30 and Crazy Bob's wedding is at 6. So I won't be able to make it to the wedding, but I do hope to have a toast to Bob and his new bride. I have been successful in securing beer for the BOF, so you'd better get their early if you want a free one. Caesar's doesn't have kegs, so it's $6/beer and we've purchased 100 of them for attendees. After that, it turns into a cash bar. Thanks to Virtuas, Codehaus, SourceBeat and yours truly for pitching in for the free booze.

My presentation tonight will be short and sweet. Rather than going through each framework author's responses, I'm just going to highlight their "sweet spot" responses. This allows me to get away with creating a measly 8-page presentation, as well as have a more interactive session. I've taken everyone's responses to the 6 questions I asked, and compiled them in a document. This document is available on the Virtuas site, just click on the link below to download it.

» View Java Web Framework Sweet Spots