Raible Designs

How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive

The illustrator for How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive has passed away. I read about this on the Dead Bus Diaries, which links to an nice obituary.

I've used this book many times in my VW career - which started way back in high school. I had a friend who was into VWs and he convinced me that my first car should be a VW Bug. I bought a '69 bug, and after driving it for 2 months, the generator went out and I decided it was time to start restoring it. I took a belt sander to it the next day, and used this book to remove the engine. Days later I was ripping out all the wiring getting ready to head to the paint shop. Needless to say, I had no idea what I was doing and the car suffered quite heavily for it. When I tried to put things back together, hardly anything worked and I had large waves in the body from grinding parts of the car down to bare metal.

I've re-built 5 VW engines in my lifetime, and I've always had this book by my side. It took me 4 times to get it right, but this was largely due to my lack of experience. Furthermore, I'd often get the engine finished and then head out on a road trip instead of waiting 500 miles for the initial settling in. Since I'm about to start rebuilding my Bus's engine, it's about time I bought a new copy of this book, so I just did that on Amazon. I haven't taken the engine out of the bus yet, but that sounds like a fun activity for next week when my Dad is in town.

RE: Oracle donates ADF Faces to Apache MyFaces

I read the news initially on the AMIS Technology blog, which points to the original news-breaker on the IT-eye Weblog. This is huge for the JSF community IMO. The main compelling feature behind component-based frameworks is components. Without components, there's not much point in them.

By christmas a website and mailing list will be available for the incubator project. You will also be able to download the source code. By New Year a subversion repository should be available with the source code. And the intention is to move out of incubator by JavaOne 2006, which I think is in May.

So why is Oracle doing this? Well it's obvious that Java needs to have a good component based framework to compete with .NET. And Oracle believes that JSF can be this Framework, but a good implementation is needed, which is what ADF Faces provides.

What does ADF Faces, or better Apache Faces Cherokee contain? More than 100 components, an Html AJAX renderkit (but it doesn't use HttpXmlRequest, but iframes), a dialog framework, personalization, skinning, and a lot more.

I wonder if Oracle has a solution for the "everything is a post" problem?

JSF is cool, and easy to be productive in, but so is Tapestry, WebWork and Spring MVC. I find it somewhat ironic that the Struts committers turned down Shale as Struts 2.0, but they voted in WebWork.

I think component-based frameworks might be the way of the future. However, after playing with OpenLaszlo for the past few weeks - I can't help but think that this is what component-based frameworks should be. Many components, easy to use, and the output is a rich-client out-of-the-box. In addition to the Flash output they have now, I've heard rumblings that OpenLaszlo may support other outputs in the future (i.e. XHTML/Ajax).

It's pretty cool to see continued excitement and innovation in Java. Competition is good, and will only make each of these frameworks stronger and easier to use.

Awesome weekend

On Friday night, I skipped out on The Spring Experience's activities and headed out for a night on the town with Julie's Aunt and Uncle, who live in Miami. "Uncle Tim" married us and we had a great time - I even talked him into doing his first Irish Car Bomb. The cab dropped me off at my hotel room at 3:20 a.m.

I slept for 2 hours before getting up at 6:00 a.m. to catch my flight back to Denver. I arrived home safely, played with the kids for a few hours, and then headed to Castle Rock for the Virtuas Christmas Party. They had a "murder mystery" show during the party, and it was very entertaining. We left early (8:30) because our babysitter couldn't stay late.

Sunday: woke up, family breakfast at UPC and picked up a Christmas tree at the local Nursery. We decided to wait a few hours before decorating the tree, so I headed to the garage to work on the Bus. Within 5 minutes, I got a call from a good friend asking if I wanted to join them for the Broncos game. "Hell yes!" I said and 30 minutes later I was sitting in the South Stands. The game kinda sucked, but the Broncos won, and the tickets were free. All in all, quite a weekend.

The Spring Experience - what a show!

Last week, I traveled to beautiful South Florida to attend The Spring Experience conference. This show was put on by Interface21 and No Fluff Just Stuff. Keith Donald (from I21) and Jay Zimmerman (from NFJS) were the organizers and both did an excellent job. This was one of the best conferences I've attended this year, and I've been to many.

Well done gentleman, can't wait for the next one. To read my posts from the event, please see the links below:

• The Spring Experience: Rod Johnson's opening Keynote
• Spring Agile Development Challenges by Keith Donald
• WebWork and Spring with Matthew Porter
• Best coverage of The Spring Experience

This week, most of the Virtuas Practice Leaders are at ApacheCon. Let's hope they blog a little about the event.

North Americans - how's that weather treatin' ya?

I can't help but link to James Halberg's post titled More of the Spring Experience.

To anyone reading this anywhere in the country other than Miami (and especially you suckers in Wisconsin), I would just like to say: ha ha, ha... ha ha... ha. I hope you're enjoying the weather.

Well said James.

New Computer - should I keep it?

When I arrived here in Florida on Wednesday, I got a call from Julie saying my Windows Desktop was hosed. When she started it up, she just got a black screen. This is the problem with having a 23" Cinema Display hooked up to a Windows box - you can never see if anything went wrong on startup. I told her she needed to hook up one of my humongous 19" CRT monitors from the basement, and plug it in to see what was wrong. 10 minutes later, she calls me back and tells me the problem: it can't find the hard drive. I walk her though putting in the XP CD and trying to repair the drive, but it doesn't work. I tried to convince her to live w/o e-mail and the internet until I got home, but that didn't fly either.

I got a call from her yesterday afternoon telling me that she'd just bought a computer from Best Buy. I cringed. "Best Buy?", I thought. Knowing my penny-pinching wife, I figured the machine would be a $300 eMachine. However, she sent me a link and I was pleasantly surprised. She bought a HP Pavilion a1250n, which seems to be a dual AMD 64. After further reading, it seems it's a dual-core and not a dual processor. Regardless, I was quite proud that she bought something that I've been thinking of getting. I've used AMD-based machines in the past and they've always seemed much faster than an equivalent Pentium box.

This machine does seem to be a "media center" PC, which is expected when you buy it from Best Buy. But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean it won't make a good development box? We have 14 days to return it, so I'm wondering if I should. I don't really want to buy a new desktop (unless it's a G5), but my 2.6 GHz Dimension 8300 has thrown up quite a few times in the last few months - so I'm probably due. I tried to talk Julie into a G5, but a lot of the software she's using for her new business is Windows-only ... and VirtualPC sucks.

Update: I've decided to keep the box, mainly because my Dell Dimension 8300 is getting old and this one seems much faster. It's unlikely I'll ever have a Mac desktop because we still need and enjoy using Windows for a lot of things. I'd love to, but it just won't fly with the wife - as well as many software vendors out there. To make things a bit speedier, I did buy 4 GB of RAM for the HP today. I'll likely turn my Dell into a Suse box for Subversion, CUPS and Samba.

Sunrise at Bal Harbour

I could get used to starting my day with this view. Don't tell Julie, she's ready to move back here.

Brrrrrrrrr

Good thing I'm heading to Florida today.

For those of you stuck in Denver this week: enjoy the weather!

Update: To see my notes from this evening's session, see The Spring Experience: Rod Johnson's opening Keynote.

New AppFuse Documentation: Axis, Handling Complex POJOs and Korean Translation

A few AppFuse enthusiasts have been hard at work, writing new documentation and tutorials. First of all, Mika Göckel has written a HowTo implement Axis tutorial - complete with an installation package! I tried it out last night, and it works quite well with AppFuse 1.8.2. If you're using a build from CVS, you'll need to make some modifications because web.xml is no longer generated. Hopefully we can fix that and get this "extras" package into CVS this week.

The 2nd tutorial is titled Handling complex objects with XDoclet, Hibernate and Struts. This one is written by the AppFuse committer Thomas Gaudin. Thomas has now written 5 tutorials, all of which include source code and step-by-step instructions.

Last, but certainly not least, DongGuk Lee has translated a large amount of AppFuse's documentation to Korean. I'm amazed that the QuickStart Guide and Tutorials have now been translated to 6 Languages!

Thanks for the contributions everyone - you guys rock!

Quick Guide to Prototype

Ryan Campbell has put together a very nice Quick Guide to Prototype. In the past, I've used the Unofficial Prototype Documentation by Sergio Pereira. Ryan's guide is a good learn-it-quick reference, while Sergio's documentation makes a nice reference manual. Hat tip to the Ajaxian gents.