Raible Designs

[ANN] AppFuse Light 1.0 - a.k.a. Equinox

For those of you looking for an AppFuse Light, I have good news for you. I've actually been sitting on it for several months now, but now I'm prepared to release it. It's name is Equinox and it's much, much simpler than AppFuse. Equinox has only one build-time dependency (CATALINA_HOME being set for the servlet-api.jar). There's no code generation and no features - not even security. However, it supports building, testing and deploying from Ant, and even has support for managing Tomcat out-of-the-box.

To get started with Equinox, you can download the QuickStart Chapter from Spring Live. This chapter shows you how to develop a simple webapp using Struts, Spring and Hibernate - which talks to an HSQL database. Struts and Spring are integrated using the ContextLoaderPlugin and all tests are designed to be run out-of-container using JUnit and StrutsTestCase. Equinox ships with project files for both Eclipse and IDEA so you can develop and run the tests in either of these top-notch IDEs. There's also a demo available. Thanks to Boér Attila for the kick-ass CSS.

If you like what you see in the QuickStart Chapter, there's much more in the other ERP chapters of Spring Live - now available for download. Too see what's in the other chapters, checkout the Chapter Summaries.

This is a nice milestone - feels good to have made it this far. Have a good weekend!

W4T Eclipse and Yoxos - like MyEclipse

The W4T Eclipse product looks pretty cool. However, the demo seems to imply that you create web apps using INNOOPRACT's web framework. While it looks useful - who in their right mind is going to develop webapps based on some company's Java framework when there's over 30 open source ones out there? Would you want to tie your application to the success of one company?

W4T Eclipse seems to be based on Yoxos. How the heck to you pronounce that?! The good news is that Yoxos is only $20 whereas MyEclipse is $30. Both are cheap - if they work well, why not have both? Note: it doesn't look like Yoxos works on the Mac (MyEclipse does).

Anyone worked with Yoxos and know what plugins it bundles?

My Job for the next couple of weeks

I can't help but brag about how cool my current gig is with Open Logic. My task for the next few weeks is to write a simple sample app - and create alternative MVC implementations. Targeted frameworks include Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF. Not only am I working from home, but they dropped off an AMD XP 2800 to work with. Installing Fedora Core 2 with VMWare is what I'm up to this morning. Working with open source all day - it doesn't get much better than this.

AppFuse on JBoss and an interesting perspective

Way back in January, Rick Hightower sent me instructions on how to run AppFuse on JBoss. I finally got around to digging through my inbox and putting them on the wiki. Here's how to run AppFuse on JBoss. If anyone is using JBoss, please feel free to edit these instructions.

Also, I noticed that Lee Grey has started an AppFuse Line-by-Line Category on this his blog. Very cool! Lee has a perspective that I never thought of:

AppFuse makes it possible for you to be productive, to take advantage of some of the most powerful and widely used open source development tools, before you really understand what you're doing. As a beautiful side-effect of this, you become familiar with Ant, Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Tiles, XDoclet, JUnit, Cactus, Canoo, DBUnit, and on and on -- all in the process of developing your application!

Good stuff Lee - keep it up! While this is a good perspective - I dread to think of supporting all those folks that don't "really understand what they're doing."

Roller Templates - could we use SiteMesh?

One of the problems with Roller's "themes" is that you have to re-create the entire HTML structure of the page when you add new pages. While this can be simplified using includes, there's got to be a a better way. An ideal solution would be to allow each user to specify a "decorator" and then use SiteMesh to pull this decorator from the database and decorate a user's pages. This seems simple enough, but is it possible?

Importing OS X Address Book into GMail

One of the problems with using GMail over .Mac is that I don't have easy synchronization of my contacts from OS X's Address Book. However, there is an easy way to get your initial set of contacts imported. Google is your friend - "export contacts gmail mac" brings up this howto. Here's the condensed version:

• Download AddressBookToCSV
• Click on "Contacts" in GMail and import

Very nice - GMail definitely has one of the best web interfaces I've ever used. Who says JavaScript sucks?

Spam issue resolved? Maybe so...

Rather than deleting my raibledesigns-DOT-com account as I was planning on doing - today I decided to simply start forwarding e-mail from matt-AT-raibledesigns-DOT-com to my GMail account. So far, it seems to be working great. But there's a greater reason it's working well. I also removed the rule that forwarded *-AT-raibledesigns-DOT-com to matt-AT-raibledesigns.com. This seems to have reduced my junk mail by about 80%. As far as I can tell, I was getting about 800 messages per day to [email protected].

According to my ISP, I received around 250 e-mails that were forwarded to GMail, and there were only about 5 that I had to "report as spam" - GMail caught the rest. The downside is that I might be losing some e-mails. For instance, I never receive any notifications from yesterday's comment-ors. Oh well, I don't mind losing a few e-mails here and there. Hopefully I'll get the important ones.

GMail or .Mac?

I don't feel like creating another @raibledesigns.com account because I can't think of anything that looks good. I like matt@ and mraible@ or raible@ just doesn't feel right. So I have a gmail.com and a mac.com account - and I'm thinking of using one of those for my primary account. GMail kinda sucks because you're stuck using the web interface and I like using mail clients like Apple's Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. .Mac allows both webmail and POP/IMAP, but they only have 15 MB of space. I'm used to unlimited space with raibledesigns.com, so using an account with limited space would be tough. .Mac has synching of contacts, which is a huge plus though. What do you recommend?

Deleting my e-mail account is going to be a real pain - I'm just starting to realize how many online accounts I have it hooked up to. Oh well, maybe alienating myself from those accounts will free up some time as well.

Working too much - what about office hours?

I currently work too much. I can feel it in my shoulders and I know it because I hardly ever exercise. Even worse, I know it because Julie tells me so and Abbie doesn't get to see enough of her Daddy. In addition to working all week, I work early mornings on the weekends, but that tends to spill into late mornings. I also try to cram in a couple hours during Abbie's nap - which usually spills over past when she gets up. During the week, I'll start at 4 or 5, and I'll need to get something done, so I'll work until 7. After Abbie goes to bed, I often hop on the computer again and work until midnight or later. It's easy getting 8 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week for a client. It's hard doing AppFuse support and writing Spring Live on the side. I virtually ignore all the e-mail on the other open source projects I'm on - it's the only way to keep my sanity.

This madness is likely to continue. The only way to reasonably handle my e-mail (> 1000 day - after spam filters) is to check it every couple of hours. That can't continue, so I'm going to have to change my e-mail address. Sorry folks, it's the easiest solution. I'll decide my new one after the holiday weekend, but matt AT raibledesigns.com will start going to /dev/null.

Julie and I've been talking today and we're trying to come up with more solutions to me working so much - especially since a fair amount of it doesn't pay. We're thinking the best solution is Office Hours. When I work from home, I work too much. When I go into a client's office, I tend to end my day when I get home. So, from now on, I'm going to try and only work from 8 to 5 MDT (-7 GMT). Actually, Julie says she doesn't care if I work before 8, I just need to be done at 5 to play with Abbie and join Julie when she goes to bed.

To help accomplish this, I'm going to start closing the door to my office and using the backdoor to leave and come back during the day. Hopefully it'll be like an office away from home. I'll likely be working on Spring Live in the mornings from 4-8 and doing some AppFuse support as well. My best bet is probably e-mail/blogging from 4-5:30 and writing from 5:30-8 (at the local bagel shop). I'll let you know how it goes. I'd also like to hear other ideas from you "I work too much" guys/gals out there - I know there's lots of you.

XDoclet and Hibernate Tutorial

I've used XDoclet and Hibernate for quite some time - but I'm sure I could stand to learn more. That's why I'm linking to this XDoclet and Hibernate Tutorial (found on JRoller). Hopefully I'll have some time to read through it after the long holiday weekend.