Raible Designs

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?

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?! ;-)

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.

JRoller's Scheduled Maintenance

I just tried to pull up JRoller to see what folks have been gabbing about for the last couple of hours. Strangely, I encountered the following message:

JRoller is currently offline for scheduled maintenance.

My question is - how can it be scheduled if they never told anyone about it? Did you get an e-mail? I don't mean to harp on Dave or the JavaLobby guys, it would simply be nice to know when maintenance will occur. Heck, maybe I can even help! ;-)

Mailstore seems to be based on AppFuse

An interesting post titled "Project and Build Structure" showed up on javablogs.com today. As I began reading the project structure layout, I thought, "that looks good." It wasn't until I viewed the build.xml file that I realized that Seyed had copied AppFuse and modified it to his needs. This is fine and the license allows you to do this. However, Seyed's post seem to indicate that he is coming up with all of this stuff on his own. It seems, to me, that Seyed is (so far) in violation of AppFuse's license. Of course, if he'd merely give credit to AppFuse, he'd be free and clear! ;-)

AppFuse Logo Contest - win an iPod

I need a logo for AppFuse. I don't care if it has the name "AppFuse" in it or if it's just an icon sort-of-thing. I'm primarily looking to replace the default icon on java.net - but good project logos are always cool. Hopefully it will imply what AppFuse is (a jumpstart kit for java webapps), but I'm more keen on a good-looking design that anything. I'll buy the winner an iPod mini. If you have a logo you'd like to submit, please upload it to my wiki using the "Attach File..." link at the bottom of the page.

Update: Wow - there's already 8 entries in 24 hours! Sweet! I think I'll end the contest next Thursday, (the 24th) and announce a winner on Friday evening.

Quick 'n Easy SiteMesh Tutorial

SiteMesh is a kick-ass tool. It's much easier to use and configure than Tiles, although I don't know if its as powerful. Tiles has Controllers that you can assign to a definition and it supports easy i18n. I've been using Tiles for over 3 years and I've only used SiteMesh for a few months. However, SiteMesh already seems to suite all my needs. I'm guessing that most people use Tiles over SiteMesh because they haven't given SiteMesh the 10 minute test.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Rick Reumann has put together a nice tutorial titled Use SiteMesh instead of Tiles.

I think you will quickly see the benefits after going through this brief example. In summary, the main reason I like SiteMesh more than Tiles is that SiteMesh is much easier to configure and use (less typing and easier to understand).

Good stuff - thanks Rick! As part of the WebWork integration into AppFuse, I was planning on using SiteMesh. I'm already using it in Spring Live sample app and it's pretty slick. I haven't had to touch it since I integrate it. Compare this with Tiles where you have to add a new definition (or JSP) everytime you want a new page. If nothing else, I think Tiles needs to learn from SiteMesh and add a Filter that can be used to decorate pages.

Colorado JUGs

The last two nights I gave talks at the Denver JUG and Boulder JUG meetings. On Wednesday night, I presented AppFuse in the basic concepts meeting and Thursday I was the main speaker at BJUG. Both meetings were great and my presentations went pretty well. Denver had about 50 attendees and Sue Spielman gave a very informative talk on J2ME. To me, J2ME seems like the equivalent of Swing for the Desktop. Building mobile-friendly websites seems like an easier route - then you don't have to worry about how the phones differ. Maybe I don't know enough about J2ME - why should I write a J2ME app when I can write a webapp? To me, it seems that I should stick with what I'm familiar with - and if I do choose to get into the mobile space, websites would be the way to go. My phone (a T68i) was very helpful last week in San Deigo. I used it's internet access and go2.com to find directions to several locations in San Diego. I just told the website to "auto-locate" me, then I'd type in an address and voila - it spit out a list of directions. Bruce and James also wrote about the Denver meeting.

Last night was the Boulder meeting, where Scott Davis kicked it off with a talk on Struts. My AppFuse presentation could've been much better if I based mine off of Scott's. I do some live coding of a DAOTest and a DAO in my presentation - and I think the audience would've gotten a lot more out of it if I'd showed them how to develop Actions and JSPs with AppFuse. Oh well, that's what the tutorials are for. I also like showing the DAO stuff because it shows the power and simplicity of the Hibernate+XDoclet+Spring combination. It's pretty cool to mention that integrating Spring into AppFuse only took a few hours. During integration, I remember deleting 5 or 6 classes/files and reducing my LOC count by about 75%.

After the meeting, I talked to one guy who was interested in adding a Swing front-end to AppFuse. I told him it shouldn't be too hard since the dao and service layers are already packaged as JARs. From a Swing app, you could easily reuse the business delegates and DAOs to talk to a database. The hard part would probably be mimicing authentication and authorization. I'm guessing that JAAS could probably provide a nice standards-compliant solution for this. I'm sure Spring's RCP project could make developing this front-end even simpler. I also talked to Kris about helping with the WebWork version of AppFuse. Hopefully he can help me out and make that happen sooner than later. I'm still targeting the end of July for a WebWork/Sitemesh-enabled release, as well as lots of enhancements to IDE friendliness.

Both meetings where followed by beers and good conversation. Last night, the tavern we were at lost power after about an hour. That didn't stop us from spending another hour in the dark telling old war stories. Good times - thanks to all who participated!

JSF can mimic Tapestry?

According to this article, JSF can do everything Tapestry does. Of course, there's a discussion on TheServerSide.com - and it's worthless so far. Hopefully some Tapestry users will chime in and we'll get some real feedback. IMO, this shows that JSF might have some real power - what's stopping it from mimicing other frameworks' favorite view technologies?

[Construction] Photos from May

It's been a while since I last posted about our house. I guess I'm due to post some new pictures. Click on either image below to see photos we took in May. The builder thinks the house will be finished and we'll be able to move in by Labor Day. Julie is due on Labor Day, so it should be an interesting race. My money is on the baby arriving first.

Raible Designs new HQ

From the front

Great Room