Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a writer with a passion for software. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

Maven tip o' the day: use a custom stylesheet

One of Maven's best features is its ability to generate websites with project documentation. In most cases, it'll motivate developers to improve the documentation for their project. At least it has for me with Struts Menu. However, Maven makes the worst mistake in the history of web development - it doesn't set a default background color. A lot of idiots do this these days, so do me a favor folks - change the default background color on your browser to something obnoxious. Mine is set to bright orange right now. Try changing yours to orange and then visiting the Maven site - its fugly. This issue isn't as bad as it used to be. Most people don't notice it, but "back in the day" when browser's used gray as their default - it was an issue. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Anyway, back to Maven. Yesterday, I was responsible for upgrading some Maven sample apps to the latest RC3, which makes the mistake mentioned above (RC1 did not). Usually when you encounter these issues in Mavenland, you click 5 times (Google with Firefox makes it 1 click) to find the plugins site and then look for its properties. In this case it's xdoc, which has a horrendous number of UI Color Settings.

These settings have two major problems. First of all, they don't work with RC3, and secondly - it's an awful way to define the colors and such for your site. Especially since its mostly related to colors. A better way that I've found is to put a maven-theme.css file in your xdocs/stylesheets directory. This will override Maven's default stylesheet and you get a lot more control over the look and feel of your Mavenized project site. The easiest way to get a template to start with is to generate your site and then copy target/docs/style/maven-theme.css into this directory. Hope this helps make Maven a little bit easier. wink

Posted in Java at Jun 25 2004, 06:56:52 AM MDT 1 Comment

The First Day

Today was a great first day on the new job. I rode my bike in - which took about an hour - and arrived around 10:00. The commute is beautiful - mostly on a bike path, and mostly along a river. It's too bad I won't be doing it more (I'll likely be working from home a lot). Most of the day was spent exploring Blue Glue, source code and the sample apps. I found out that Blue Glue (which is basically a development environment installer and configurer) on Windows has gotten much better since Out-of-the-Box 2.x. Now it skips most of the Windows installers and everything is installed through OpenLogic's Swing app. It was a fun day talking about open source and how things integrate together. I'm not used to talking with folks about my open source experiences and enthusiasm - so it was a nice change.

The best part was when I received my assignment for the next couple of days: upgrade the Maven sample apps to the latest version and enhance one to include build/deployment examples. I'm also responsible for writing documentation on the sample apps for developers who use them. While I'm not a huge Maven fan, I know that some people like it and it'll be cool to create a "how to" for those folks. On the ride home, I realized that I'm really enjoying what I do right now. I'm basically developing and writing for developers. I have no "business" clients per se - most are developers: both with Spring Live and Blue Glue. The downside is that developers tend to be a pretty smart lot - and if I screw up - they'll let me know about it. Oh well, open source rocks - it's cool to be working with it full time.

The worst part of the day was coming home to over 1000 e-mails - from not checking my e-mail all day. I've got a major spam problem since about 200 of those are from mailing lists and I was only interested in 20-30 beyond that. I'm thinking of changing my e-mail address. Rather than adding more junk filters - I need to eliminate the sheer volume - it's choking both Mail.app and Outlook - and I have a 2 MB connection!

Posted in General at Jun 23 2004, 09:57:12 PM MDT 5 Comments

Bike to Work Day 2004

I'm pumped - tomorrow is not only my first day, but it's also Bike to Work Day 2004. I hope it's only 1 hour from my house, but I'll probably get lost and it'll take 2. There's nothing like starting the day on a bike with an iPod.

Posted in General at Jun 22 2004, 09:40:27 PM MDT 1 Comment

www.blueglue.com

I figured the OpenLogic guys might've botten blueglue.com. However, when I tried it - I got something much better - check it out yourself.

Posted in General at Jun 22 2004, 09:34:55 PM MDT

Booze, Baby, Booze

Java One Blogger Meetup on Monday. Be there or be square. I'll be around Sunday night if anyone wants to do a little pre-party before Monday. My goals for the week are to attend at least 5 sessions and meet some folks that I've never meet before. Who's bringing the chasers? ;-)

Posted in Java at Jun 22 2004, 09:27:24 PM MDT 2 Comments

EJB Solutions is now Open Logic

Open Logic EJB Solutions has changed their name to Open Logic and Out-of-the-Box has become Blue Glue. Why do I care? Because I start working for them (as a contractor) tomorrow! It'll be cool to work for a company that's just changed their whole website and released a new version of their product. Sounds like my kind of environment. It's kinda strange that their press releases have next Monday on them - I guess to coincide with JavaOne?

Posted in Java at Jun 21 2004, 10:22:04 PM MDT 6 Comments

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there. I'd particularly like to recognize Dave, Lance and Russ. All were Dads when I met them through this blogging medium, and its great to see they continue to produce content and more children. Russ - is there going to be a #2?

Below is a recent picture of Abbie - I sure am a proud Papa!

Abbie sure is growing up fast

Of course, I'd also like to recognize my own Dad - who continues to amaze me with his knowledge of history and his perception on life. Our trip back from San Diego was a blast and I can't wait until he (and the rest of my family) comes out to Denver for my birthday next month. Thanks for being such a great friend and father Pappy.

Posted in General at Jun 20 2004, 09:23:40 PM MDT 5 Comments

JavaOne - do you have a plan?

I've never been to JavaOne before, but this year I'm attending thanks to SourceBeat. I was planning on attending this conference as I do most - show up, look at the sessions and attend the ones that sound interesting. If it's anything like the MySQL Conference I attended in April, I won't be attending many. There were a lot of PHP and clustering sessions that just didn't interest me, so I only attended a few sessions each day. Compare that to NFJS, where there were many interesting sessions that same time and I hated choosing one over the other.

JavaOne is approaching fast and we'll all be there in 10 days. There seems to be a lot of folks planning what they're going to see each day. Is this a good idea, or can I get away with wingin' it? What about the parties - I've heard about them, but I have no idea what they entail? Are they corporate sponsored - or just a bunch of guys going out drinking together?

Posted in Java at Jun 18 2004, 05:00:00 PM MDT 9 Comments

Google Ranking: Now at #20

I did a little navel gazing this morning after reading this post and its links. As of today, I'm the 20th result for "Matt" on Google. If I had the word "matt" in my domain name, I wouldn't be surprised, but the fact that I hardly have it anywhere probably means a lot of folks are linking to me. Maybe it's because my Google Number is almost to 50,000.

It's funny that in 1 and 1/2 years, I've gone from #213 to #20. Matt Croydon was #45 when I was #213. Now he's #30. How's that for a bunch of useless information?! ;-)

Posted in General at Jun 18 2004, 10:45:56 AM MDT 4 Comments

What am I up to?

I'm riding my bike all over Denver and hacking Word. It's been a productive and fun week so far. Don't expect many updates.

Posted in General at Jun 15 2004, 05:41:13 PM MDT