Raible Designs

Learn about WebWork 2.2 and Tapestry 4.0 via Podcasts

I've said in the past that Podcasts are boring. I still think this is true for the most part, but that's largely because most of them aren't appealing to me. However, this week I've found a couple of good ones. Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2 have recently been released, and now you can listen to interviews with both project's primary developers: Patrick Lightbody of WebWork and Howard Lewis Ship of Tapestry/Hivemind. The easiest way I've found to subscribe and listen to podcasts is to download iTunes. You also may want to checkout The Java Podcasters article on ONJava.com.

I hope to upgrade both Equinox and AppFuse to these releases in the near future, I just need to find the time. I also hope to change the default web framework in AppFuse to Struts Action 2 as part of AppFuse 2.0. This will allow us to ditch Struts and WebWork and only support 4 web frameworks (SA2, Spring MVC, Tapestry and JSF).

Does JPOX suck?

There's an ongoing effort in Roller to migrate from Hibernate to JDO. Mostly, this is due to Apache's silly rule about no L/GPL dependencies - even if they're downloaded separately. I think this is a valiant effort, especially if JDO performs as well as Hibernate.

However, it was interesting to see the following message on the mailing list this morning:

i have experience using jdo, and jpox in particular, with a commercial product. first, you probably already know this, but jdo is dead (from a spec perspective anyway). it will be phased out in favor of ejb3 persistence. maybe that transition will be graceful, maybe not. i see jpox has ejb3 on their roadmap, but not sure what that means.

second, jpox has really, very atrocious performance issues. the jpox folks admit that performance is a low priority, as they are an ri. if someone wants the details on this, i can dig them up.

Interestingly enough, this message is from a Sun employee. It's interesting to hear someone from Sun say that "jdo is dead". What are you thoughts? Should Roller change their persistence backend just to satisfy Apache?

Of course, now you'll tell me your favorite Apache-licensed persistence framework and why it's worked so well for you. The real question is - are you willing to re-write Roller's backend using it?

Spring Workshops from Virtuas

I'm pleased to announce that my company, Virtuas, has decided to start offering public workshops for many prominent open source projects. These include Spring, Geronimo, Tomcat, Hibernate and JSF/MyFaces.

I'll be teaching the first Spring course in Denver February 21st - 24th, followed by one in Boston in mid-March. It should be a fun class, especially since I'm adding a bunch of stuff regarding Spring 2.0. Since I know you're going to ask the price -- and it's not posted on virtuas.com -- it's $2,495 per person for 1-4 people from the same company/group/etc., $1,995 per person for five or more people.

In other Virtuas news, we've recently signed partnership agreements with IBM and Covalent. We also re-worked our site with Andreas Viklund's "andreas08" theme from Open Source Web Design. Thanks to the power of Drupal, all we had to do to change the whole site was modify one PHP template and one CSS file. Thanks to both Andreas and Drupal for vastly simplifying our new look-n-feel.

Update: It looks like Andreas's theme has been made into a Drupal theme. Nice.

Back from Cancun

We arrived back in Denver after an awesome week in Cancun. There's no real good stories to tell, just lots of fun, laughter and relaxation with family. Below are some pictures from our trip, as well as many others on Flickr.

Right before I left last Saturday, I released AppFuse 1.9, then went to watch the Broncos vs. Patriots at Invesco Field. Today, it's the Steelers. It's pretty cool to come home to a town this excited. Go Broncos!!

Off to Cancun!

See you in a week!

Hmmmmmm

This will make you have second thoughts about purchasing a MacBook, eh?

..."They can't get enough Core Duo (chips)," said my source. He also said that if he were me, he probably wouldn't order one of the new MacBook Pros. I asked if there would be MacBook replacements for the 17-inch and 12-inch PowerBooks, but he said, "Oh, it's much cooler than that. Much cooler." - Leander Kahney

MacBook Pro

Thanks Steve. Much appreciated.

Purchased. Fully-loaded. Ships in February.

Lightbox JS

Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers. I dig it.

Media Center and Skype 2.0

Ever since we got our new HP Pavilion, I've been improving it and my "home office" setup as well. First off, I bought 2GB of RAM to boost it up to 3GB. Then I got a DVI KVM Switch, so I could plug Windows and Linux into the same KVM setup. Installing OpenSuse wasn't too hard, but configuring CUPS and Samba and adding a 2nd drive took a bit of wrestling. The best part, however, has been yesterday and today.

Julie got everyone in our families new webcams for Christmas. For the past week or so, we've been trying to get them to work. I've had an iSight for almost a year, and I've never been able to get it to work when talking with my parents. This time was no different, but we did get the Mac working with Yahoo Messenger. This led to getting Yahoo working on my Windows box, but the sound sucked and the video wasn't that good. I couldn't get any other IM clients to work either. Then I remembered Skype and thought "they must have video by now". Sure 'nuff, when I checked a few days ago, they had Skype 2.0 with video support. It worked great right away and I had a great "talk" with my parents last night.

Tonight, I got my sister hooked up on Skype and we talked for a bit. She's currently having lots of computer issues and Skype crashes (and quits working altogether) after working fine for about a minute. My dad had a few issues with his machine too - mainly due to Skype tacking out his 1GHz/1GB machine. Bottom line: Skype with Video works great if you have a new machine with plenty o' memory.

Lastly, I received a TV Tuner tonight from Amazon - thanks to a JavaLobby gift certificate (thanks guys!) Note that you need a card with "MCE" in the model name if you want it to work with Media Center. I plugged it in, configured it, and now I'm watching Law & Order while typing this. I setup Conan to record every night and life is good. It's a pretty cool setup - now I just need a new dual-core Intel-based PowerBook to get the best of everything.

Steve, PLEASE announce Intel PowerBooks

I totally agree with Dion. For the love of God, pppplllllleeeeeeeaaaaaaasssssseeeee announce Intel-based ass-kicking PowerBooks tomorrow!! I love my PowerBook, but I hate the speed. It's extremely frustrating developing in Java on it, especially when I spend 60% of my time on a dual-core AMD 64. If Apple doesn't announce new PowerBooks tomorrow, it's likely I'll buy a Ferrari instead.