Raible Designs

JavaOne 2013: My Presentations

I flew into San Francisco this past Monday to speak at JavaOne 2013, and to meet with my new client. I made sure to wear a Broncos shirt since I was riding the train through Oakland and had some co-workers that were Raiders fans. My trip started off nicely as the Broncos dismantled the Raiders on Monday Night Football. My new team and I watched it during a team dinner at Havana in Walnut Creek. Historically, the Broncos and Raiders have had a heated rivalry historically, so the win was the perfect start to the week.

On Tuesday, I worked from my hotel in the morning, then met James Ward to do some last minute prep for our smackdown. The prior week, we both upgraded our respective apps to use the latest versions of Grails and Play Framework. I ran into a few issues when upgrading, while Play required some API changes.

We both added Memcachier to our apps (to share caching between dynos) and ran some Apache Bench tests. The results showed quite a bit of slowdown compared to last time, which we attributed to caching needing to make network hops. Other than that, we both had to make changes to our framework's buildpacks to get the latest versions running on Heroku, and when we headed for our talk, my instance of Grails wasn't running (60 second boot timeout on startup). The good news is it somehow solved its issues during our talk and was up and running when I checked it after, as it is now. Below is an embedded version of the presentation we delivered. You can also click here to see it in a new window, or view it on SlideShare.

On Wednesday morning, I tried to attend Venkat's Programming with Lambda Expressions in Java, but quickly discovered it was sold out. My talk on The Modern Java Web Developer started shortly after and I had a fantastic time talking to a packed room and preaching the virtues of learning and staying up-to-date with web technologies. I made sure to include a slide on Avatar, an Oracle-sponsored JavaScript-based framework that requires "very minor JavaScript knowledge". You can view my presentation below or on SlideShare.

According to @JavaOneConf, all JavaOne 2013 presentations will be published on Parleys.com.

After completing my talks, I journeyed to my client and practiced what I preached, successfully finishing a spike that reduced page load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds. That evening, I attended the Oracle Appreciation Event at Treasure Island, had some cold beer and listened to some loud music.

I had a great time speaking at JavaOne this year, and look forward to my next speaking engagement. In November, I'll be traveling to Devoxx where I'll be giving a 3-hour University session on The Modern Java Web Developer. Hope to see you there!

JavaOne 2013: My First Time Speaking

I've been to JavaOne many times in my life, starting in 2004 and continuing in 2005, 2006 and 2008. I have fond memories of the first couple years, meeting all the Java open source guys and having a lot of fun.

You might notice that the aforementioned blog posts no longer show pictures. That's because they were originally hosted on Apple's HomePage, which they shut down years ago. I haven't bothered to republish the photos and fix the links, but I do still have them. For those looking for a blast from the past, checkout Mike, Howard and James or Bruce and Marc. I also have a set of photos from our Geronimo Live party in 2006.

As many of you know, JavaOne used to be a huge conference, attracting 15,000 attendees back in the day. Numbers have dwindled a lot since Oracle bought Sun and I've heard recent years are more around 1500. Since I've spoken at a lot of conferences, but never JavaOne, I figured I'd try this year. The good news is I got accepted and I'll be there next week!

On Tuesday afternoon, I'll be presenting the Play Framework vs Grails Smackdown with James Ward. On Wednesday morning, I'll be talking about The Modern Java Web Developer. I also look forward to The Black Keys on Wednesday night.

I have a feeling it's gonna be a great week!

Developing with AngularJS - Part IV: Making it Pop

Welcome to the final article in a series on my experience developing with AngularJS. I learned its concepts, beat my head against-the-wall with and finally tamed it enough to create a "My Dashboard" feature for a client. For previous articles, please see the following:

• Part I: The Basics
• Part II: Dialogs and Data
• Part III: Services

The last mile of development for the My Dashboard feature was to spice things up a bit and make it look better. We hired a design company to come up a new look and feel and they went to work. Within a week, we had a meeting with them and they presented a few different options. We picked the one we liked the best and went to work. Below are screenshots that I used to implement the new design.

Matrimony in Montana

On July 27, 2013, in the late afternoon, Trish McGinity and I were married at the Holland Lake Lodge, in the town I grew up in. The Lodge was a favorite childhood place and getting married there, to the awesomest woman ever, was a glorious experience. There were several planned activities (e.g. horseback riding, rafting, golfing) the week before our wedding day, and many of our friends and family joined the fun. While we couldn't capture every smile, giggle, or loving moment, this is an endeavor to document our matrimony month, our wedding week, and the day we sealed the deal.

We started our month in Montana on Sunday, June 30th. We're officially calling it Raible Road Trip #18. We packed up our pets, raft and golf clubs and left Denver around happy hour.

To read more about our rafting adventures, our wedding week festivities and our delightful wedding day, please click the link below. You can also skip directly to the wedding week or wedding day.

Happy Birthday Jack!

My son Jack, or "J Jackson" as he liked to be called, turns 9 years old today. In the last year, he's grown up quite a bit. He learned how to play basketball last fall, snowboard last winter and became a Webelos Scout in the spring. This summer, he learned how to ride a motorcycle and had a blast whitewater rafting with us. He did a fabulous job being my Best Son in our wedding.

This past weekend, we had a birthday party for Jack -- complete with a huge inflatable water slide. Trish and I flew in from our honeymoon 10 hours before the party started, but still managed to oversleep from jet lag. Nevertheless, we made it in time for some good fun and had a great time celebrating with the whole family and new friends from his new school. Below are a few choice pictures. The rest are on Flickr.

Jack's favorite thing to do is play Minecraft or watch YouTube videos about it. His sister still knows how to push his buttons, but he's learning to ignore her. This is a big year for Jack as he's starting a new school and making a bunch of new friends. I know he'll do great and I look forward to helping him adapt and enjoy it. Happy Birthday Jack!

Related: Jack's 8th, 5th, 4th, 3rd and 1st birthdays.

Developing with AngularJS - Part III: Services

This is the 3rd article in a series on my experience developing with AngularJS. I used AngularJS for several months to create a "My Dashboard" feature for a client and learned a whole bunch of Angular goodness along the way. For previous articles, please see Part I: The Basics and Part II: Dialogs and Data.

Angular offers several ways to interact with data from the server. The easiest way is to use the $resource factory, which lets you interact with RESTful server-side data sources. When we started the My Dashboard project, we were hoping to interact with a REST API, but soon found out that it didn't have all the data we needed. Rather than loading the page and then making another request to get its data, we decided to embed the JSON in the page. For communication back to the server, we used our tried-and-true Ajax solution: DWR.

In Angular-speak, services are singletons that carry out specific tasks common to web apps. In other words, they're any $name object that can be injected into a controller or directive. However, as a Java Developer, I tend to think of services as objects that communicate with the server. Angular's documentation on Creating Services shows you various options for registering services. I used the angular.Module api method.

Video of Comparing JVM Web Frameworks from Devoxx France

Whenever I do a talk, I get requests for a recording of it. It's rare that recordings are made, but when they are, I like to share them. In March of this year, I traveled to Devoxx France and had a great time. One of the talks I delivered was Comparing JVM Web Frameworks, with a bit of a twist from prior versions.

I started reading The Paradox of Choice and found many parallels to the agony that developers experience with choosing a web framework. I described how I didn't think good framework decisions were based on the many, many features that frameworks have, but often on pre-defined constraints. There's those lucky developers that get to choose a Full Stack Framework because they're doing greenfield development. Then there's those that want a better Pure Web Framework that replaces something (e.g. Struts) that's not satisfying their needs. And lastly, there's those that've found it possible to leverage a SOFEA and use a JavaScript MVC framework with an API Framework on the backend. I don't think it makes sense to compare all web frameworks and I tried to use these pre-defined constraints (language, platform and application type) argument to separate into categories and help make choosing easier.

The good folks at Parleys have published the video of this talk. If you haven't heard of Parleys, it's an awesome platform for watching conference talks. As their Mission Statement says: If YouTube and Slideshare would make a baby then it would be named Parleys.

Below is an embedded video of this presentation - I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did delivering it!

Developing with AngularJS - Part II: Dialogs and Data

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article on how I started developing with AngularJS. I used AngularJS for several months to develop a "My Dashboard" feature for a client's product and learned a whole bunch of stuff along the way.

This article provides an overview of how I changed some of My Dashboard's features to use Angular instead of jQuery. After finishing the prototype work in January, we started moving bits and pieces into the main application. We kept the same file names for our Angular-related files and copied them into the project.

All these files are packaged up into a dashboard.js file that's included at the bottom of our Dashboard page. While our prototype used jQuery 1.9 and jQuery UI 1.10, the application's codebase used jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.3. Luckily, this didn't present a problem as everything continued to work as expected.

Around this time, we also had many discussions with the Product Team about charts. Since Highcharts required we purchase a license, we took at look at AnyChart, which we were already using. We were able to get AnyChart to work with our existing chart directive with minimal changes. Most changes were in the JSON itself.

We committed the first pass (with sample data still hard-coded) in mid-February.

Father's Day Weekend on The Colorado River

I've been writing about Father's Day since this blog was first born. It all started with my first Father's Day in 2003, continued in 2004 (the year I bought The Bus), 2005 and 2006. In 2008, I started the Father's Day Camping Trip tradition and it's been a blast ever since. We spent a couple years at the Great Sand Dunes and a year at Lake Granby. Last year, we changed things up a bit and headed to The Oregon Coast. This year, we brought back the camping tradition, packed up the raft we bought last year and headed for the Upper Colorado River.

On Saturday, we put in at Rancho del Rio and took out at Two Bridges. This stretch took about 4 hours, which was perfect considering we didn't put in until 2pm. Saturday night, we camped at Catamount, then started early Sunday floating from Catamount to Pinball (9 miles). We got on the river around 10 and disembarked 5½ hours later.

Developing with AngularJS - Part I: The Basics

There's many, many different introductions to AngularJS available on the internet. This article is not another introduction, but rather a story about my learning experience. It all started way back in January of this year. I was working as a UI Architecture Consultant at Taleo/Oracle, my client for the last 21 months. My gig there ended last month, but they agreed to let me publish a series of articles about the knowledge I gained.

Project Background

The Director of Product Management had been working on the concepts for a new project - codenamed "Visual MyView". Below is a mockup he created for our kickoff meeting on January 4th.

From his original email about the above mockup:

I started the initial layout with static HTML and CSS and had a wireframe to show by mid January.

By the end of January, we'd renamed the project to My Dashboard and had a working prototype using CoolClock and moment.js for the clock in the top right, AngularJS to display widget data, jQuery UI for drag-n-drop of rows and widgets, Bootstrap's Carousel for holding charts and Highcharts for rendering charts.