Raible Designs

Happy Birthday Abbie!

It's hard to believe that my daughter, Abbie, is now 12 years old. She's in 6th grade now, attending middle school and loving that she gets to choose her classes. I'm particularly happy to see her studying video game design and programming simple games. The picture on the right is of Abbie and her horse, Medallion. Unfortunately, he had to be put down the very next day because of colic. Trish and Abbie were leasing him, but were planning on buying him. It was a very sad day in the Raible household.

Abbie is still taking horseback riding lessons and might start participating in horse shows next year. For the ski season, we got her the 6th-Grade Passport. For $100, she can ski a few days at all the resorts in Colorado. We don't plan to travel as much as we did last year, but we do plan on skiing a bunch.

Happy Birthday Abbie! You're an awesome 12-year-old and we had a great time celebrating your birthday with you tonight.

Devoxx4Kids - Denver: Introduction to Hardware Concepts with littleBits

I'm pleased to announce the second meeting of the Denver Chapter of Devoxx4Kids is now open for registration. It's a two hour class titled Introduction to Hardware Concepts with littleBits and will be taught by Denver's own Tack Mobile. To learn more about littleBits, see http://littlebits.cc. If you or your company would like help by donating a Workshop Set, please contact me.

The class will be held on Saturday, November 22nd, from 10am - 12pm at Assembly Workspace. Cost is $10, but you'll get that back in the form of a t-shirt. Age requirement is 9-18 and kids should have basic computer skills (copy/paste, opening applications, etc.).

I'd like to thank Juan Sanchez for reaching out to me about this class and inspiring his company (and workspace) to make it all happen. It's been great working with you and your team Juan!

When I started Devoxx4Kids Denver, I was hoping to host a class or two per year. Our first meetup in May was a wild success. After taking the summer off to relax, I started looking for more speakers in early October. The response has been great and we'll have another class about GreenFoot on December 13th. We're even in the planning stages for another session on NAO Humanoid Robot programming in Q1 2015.

If you'd like to get involved with Denver's Devoxx4Kids, please join our meetup group.

Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data

If someone asked you to develop a REST API on the JVM, which frameworks would you use? I was recently tasked with such a project. My client asked me to implement a REST API to ingest requests from a 3rd party. The project entailed consuming XML requests, storing the data in a database, then exposing the data to internal application with a JSON endpoint. Finally, it would allow taking in a JSON request and turning it into an XML request back to the 3rd party.

With the recent release of Apache Camel 2.14 and my success using it, I started by copying my Apache Camel / CXF / Spring Boot project and trimming it down to the bare essentials. I whipped together a simple Hello World service using Camel and Spring MVC. I also integrated Swagger into both. Both implementations were pretty easy to create (sample code), but I decided to use Spring MVC. My reasons were simple: its REST support was more mature, I knew it well, and Spring MVC Test makes it easy to test APIs.

Camel's Swagger support without web.xml
As part of the aforementioned spike, I learned out how to configure Camel's REST and Swagger support using Spring's JavaConfig and no web.xml. I made this into a sample project and put it on GitHub as camel-rest-swagger.

This article shows how I built a REST API with Java 8, Spring Boot/MVC, JAXB and Spring Data (JPA and REST components). I stumbled a few times while developing this project, but figured out how to get over all the hurdles. I hope this helps the team that's now maintaining this project (my last day was Friday) and those that are trying to do something similar.

Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part IV: Load Testing and Monitoring

Welcome to the final article in a series on my experience developing services with Apache Camel. I learned how to implement CXF endpoints using its Java DSL, made sure everything worked with its testing framework and integrated Spring Boot for external configuration. For previous articles, please see the following:

• Part I: The Inspiration
• Part II: Creating and Testing Routes
• Part III: Integrating Spring 4 and Spring Boot

This article focuses on load testing and tools for monitoring application performance. In late July, I was asked to look into load testing the new Camel-based services I'd developed. My client's reason was simple: to make sure the new services were as fast as the old ones (powered by IBM Message Broker). I sent an email to the Camel users mailing list asking for advice on load testing.

In reply, I received suggestions for Apache's ab tool and Gatling. I'd heard of Gatling before, and decided to try it.

TL;DR

This article shows how to use Gatling to load test a SOAP service and how to configure Log4j2 with Spring Boot. It also shows how hawtio can help monitor and configure a Camel application. I hope you enjoyed reading this series on what I learned about developing with Camel over the past several months. If you have stories about your experience with Camel (or similar integration frameworks), Gatling, hawtio or New Relic, I'd love to hear them.

It's been a great experience and I look forward to developing solid apps, built on open source, for my next client. I'd like to get back into HTML5, AngularJS and mobile development. I've had a good time with Spring Boot and JHipster this year and hope to use them again. I find myself using Java 8 more and more; my ideal next project would embrace it as a baseline. As for Scala and Groovy, I'm still a big fan and believe I can develop great apps with them.

If you're looking for a UI/API Architect that can help accelerate your projects, please let me know! You can learn more about my extensive experience from my LinkedIn profile.

[Read More]

The 21-Day Sugar Detox

For the past 21-days, I've been on a sugar detox. Becky Reece, a long-time friend of Trish's, inspired us to do it. Becky is a nutritionist and we've always admired how fit she is. Becky challenged a bunch of her friends to do it, and Trish signed up. I told Trish I'd do it with her to make things easier from a cooking perspective.

To be honest, we really didn't know what we were getting into when we started it. Trish ordered the book the week before we started and it arrived a couple days before things kicked off. Trish started reading the book the night before we started. That's when we realized we should've prepared more. The book had all kinds of things you were supposed to do the week before you started the detox. Most things involved shopping and cooking, so you were prepared with pre-made snacks and weren't too stressed out.

We started the detox on Monday, September 22, 2014. That's when we first realized there was no alcohol (we both love craft beer). Trish shopped and cooked like a madwoman that first week. I think we spent somewhere around $600 on groceries. Trish wrote about our first week on her blog.

We are on Sunday Day-7 and made it through the first week with two birthday parties and a nice dinner out eating well and staying on track. I'm not weighing myself until the end, but my face looks a little slimmer, my skin feels smoother and my wedding ring is not as tight as it used to be. I feel great and have started to believe this is the last detox, diet or cleanse I will ever need. Cleansing my life of sugar could be a life changer especially when an Avo-Coconana Smoothie with Almond Butter Pad Thai becomes my new favorite meal.

[Read More]

Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part III: Integrating Spring 4 and Spring Boot

This article is the third in a series on Apache Camel and how I used it to replace IBM Message Broker for a client. I used Apache Camel for several months this summer to create a number of SOAP services. These services performed various third-party data lookups for our customers. For previous articles, see Part I: The Inspiration and Part II: Creating and Testing Routes.

In late June, I sent an email to my client's engineering team. Its subject: "External Configuration and Microservices". I recommended we integrate Spring Boot into the Apache Camel project I was working on. I told them my main motivation was its external configuration feature. I also pointed out its container-less WAR feature, where Tomcat (or Jetty) is embedded in the WAR and you can start your app with "java -jar appname.war". I mentioned microservices and that Spring Boot would make it easy to split the project into a project-per-service structure if we wanted to go that route. I then asked two simple questions:

1. Is it OK to integrate Spring Boot?
2. Should I split the project into microservices?

Both of these suggestions were well received, so I went to work.

Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part II: Creating and Testing Routes

This article is the second in a series on Apache Camel and how I used it to replace IBM Message Broker for a client. The first article, Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part I: The Inspiration, describes why I chose Camel for this project.

To make sure these new services correctly replaced existing services, a 3-step approach was used:

1. Write an integration test pointing to the old service.
2. Write the implementation and a unit test to prove it works.
3. Write an integration test pointing to the new service.

I chose to start by replacing the simplest service first. It was a SOAP Service that talked to a database to retrieve a value based on an input parameter. To learn more about Camel and how it works, I started by looking at the CXF Tomcat Example. I learned that Camel is used to provide routing of requests. Using its CXF component, it can easily produce SOAP web service endpoints. An end point is simply an interface, and Camel takes care of producing the implementation.

Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part I: The Inspiration

In early May, my client asked me to work on a project migrating from IBM Message Broker 6.1 to an open source solution. Their reason was simple, the IBM solution was end of life and outdated. To prove how out of date it was, the Windows version required Windows XP to run. IBM WebSphere Message Broker has been replaced by IBM Integration Bus in recent years, but no upgrade path existed.

At first, I didn't want to do the project. I was hired as a Modern Java/UI Architect and I had enjoyed my first month upgrading libraries, making recommendations and doing a bit of UI performance work. I hadn't done much with ESBs and I enjoy front-end development a lot more than backend. It took me a couple days to realize they were willing to pay me to learn. That's when I decided to clutch up, learn how to do it all, and get the job done. This article is the first in a series on what I learned during this migration project.

My approach for figuring out how everything worked was similar to working on any new application. I get the source code, install the software necessary to run it, and run it locally so I can interact with it.

Rafting the Green River through Desolation Canyon

After rafting the Yampa in June, we knew we'd experienced a once-in-a-lifetime kinda trip. We never expected to have two in one summer. When we got an invite to raft Desolation Canyon over Labor Day weekend, we jumped at the opportunity.

The trip started on Jack's birthday: Thursday, August 28th. We drove from Denver to Green River, Utah the night before, and had some adventures along the way. As we were heading down Vail Pass, our trailer started to swing from side to side, almost whiplashing us off the road. We quickly slowed down and didn't go over 65 MPH for the rest of the trip. I figured this was caused by the rear spring spacers we added to the Syncro. The heightened rear caused the raft trailer to be out of balance, and we needed a new hitch to drop it down.

We arrived around 1:30am, popped the top on our camper and went to sleep. The next morning, we woke up and met some of our fellow floaters for the first time. An hour later, were were getting ready to leave and I was inspecting our trailer. That's when I noticed one of the wheels was about to fall off. The bearings were shot and the wheel was barely hanging on.

Luckily, one of the guys we just met had replaced all his trailer's bearings the week before and was on it. He knew exactly what to do and went to work. There was a Napa Auto Parts store a mile away. Two hours and several trips to Napa later, we were back in business and on the road.

We celebrated Jack's 10th birthday while driving to the put in, opening presents and having a good ol' time. We also had some cupcakes to celebrate with everyone once we arrived. Jack was especially pumped for the huckleberries my Mom overnighted.

We launched with five families total, 10 adults and 10 kids. We had five rafts, a duckey, an inner tube and two motors to get us through the flat water. We didn't get on the river until 6pm that first day, and only made it seven miles before dark.

Getting Started with JHipster on OS X

Last week I was tasked with developing a quick prototype that used AngularJS for its client and Spring MVC for its server. A colleague developed the same application using Backbone.js and Spring MVC. At first, I considered using my boot-ionic project as a starting point. Then I realized I didn't need to develop a native mobile app, but rather a responsive web app.

My colleague mentioned he was going to use RESThub as his starting point, so I figured I'd use JHipster as mine. We allocated a day to get our environments setup with the tools we needed, then timeboxed our first feature spike to four hours.

My first experience with JHipster failed the 10-minute test. I spent a lot of time flailing about with various "npm" and "yo" commands, getting permissions issues along the way. After getting thinks to work with some sudo action, I figured I'd try its Docker development environment. This experience was no better.

JHipster seems like a nice project, so I figured I'd try to find the causes of my issues. This article is designed to save you the pain I had. If you'd rather just see the steps to get up and running quickly, skip to the summary.