Raible Designs

Open XUL Alliance Site Goes Live

From The ServerSide.com, I became aware of the Open XUL Alliance.

The Open XUL Alliance site went live today.

The goal is to promote all things XUL (XML UI Language) and also to provide free test suites to help ensure interoperability between different XUL motors/browsers/runtimes and free, open-source show-case examples (aka blue prints) to demo the power of XML for creating UIs.

For now the Open XUL Alliance Site sports:

* XUL News Wire - Breaking News About XUL; also known as the xul-announce Mailing List

* The Richmond Post - Chronicle of the XUL Revolution; XUL News Weblog

* xul-talk Mailing List - Beyond Mozilla; Talk about XUL issues touching more than one XUL motor/browser/runtime

* XUL Lecture Series - Rich Clients, Rich Browser, Rich Portals and much more

* XUL Link-opida - Articles, FAQs, Cheat Sheets and much more

Use the XUL, XForms and SVG trio to build rich clients for web services today.

Visit the Open XUL Alliance

Good JavaServer Faces Article

The latest issue of Java Developers Journal has an excellent article on developing with JavaServer Faces. I read it on the plane last week and thoroughly enjoyed it. I like it so much, that if I had my laptop with me, I probably wouldn't tried porting one of my sample apps to use JSF.

However, the magazine I had did not have any code samples in it - even though it referred to Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. So naturally, I was excited to see the online version and the downloadable source code. I might be a little ignorant (being from Montana and all ;-), but this download does nothing for me. It's a 3K zip file with one file in it - that has no extension. If I view it with Notepad, I get some text, but lots of garbage too. This would be a much better article if it included a simple WAR file. An example app that cannot be downloaded and run (or built and then run) is worth nothing to me.

[ANNOUNCE] Apache 2.0.46 Released

The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the ninth public release of the Apache 2.0 HTTP Server.
...
Apache 2.0 versions 2.0.37 through 2.0.45 can be caused to crash in certain circumstances. This can be triggered remotely through mod_dav and possibly other mechanisms. Specific details and an analysis of the crash will be published Friday, May 30. All Apache 2.0 users are encouraged to upgrade now.

News you can use - Quartz Plugin for Struts

While plowing through the 5000+ e-mails at work this morning, I tripped over the QuartzPlugin for Struts. This looks very cool - a way to configure scheduled tasks (i.e. a cron job) as part of your web application.

The QuartzPlugin for Struts allows you to automatically configure and start a Quartz scheduler upon initialization of your Struts application. It also places itself in your application context to make a scheduler available within your actions. That is, in addition to statically scheduled events like "every six hours," you can dynamically schedule events from Struts actions for "24 hours from now".

Now I just hope I get a chance to utilize this bad boy in the near future.

RE: Listen to RSS feeds on your iPod

Damn, after reading e-mail and blogs for the last couple of hours, I'm slowly starting to create a list of things to do. Life is so much slower and easier without a computer! Anyway, it looks like I have all the equipment to listen to RSS feeds on my iPod. I'm also thinking of downloading books from Audible.com and learning on my way to work, rather than simply listening to music. BTW, I got Mini-Me back today (after sending it to Apple) - they fixed the hinge, but not the loose case.

Home Sweet Home

We arrived home just a couple of hours ago - and boy is it good to be back in the land of no humidity. Julie's skin is itching already (it loves humidity) and mine is loving life. I don't plan on detailing all the blogging events I missed, but since nothing earth shattering appears to have happened - it looks like it was a good time to relax and get away. There are, however, some things worth mentioning:

• These CSS Tabs are wicked cool and at first glance, I think I can create a tabbed menu for struts-menu with a bit of CSS and the ListDisplayer.
• The pseudo-class selector :hover can be used on a paragraph to create a cool effect and I might have to use it... someday.

It's good to be back - and was one of the most relaxing vacations I've ever had.

Animal Planet Live

At the beach

My two ladies.

Vacation Rocks!

I'm home for a mere 12 hours between my New York trip and my Florida trip. Vacation has been awesome so far - and one of the best parts has been not having my laptop and therefore not try to "get things done" - as I am right now! ;-)

Hightlights (so far) have been seeing all my family, seeing Matrix Reloaded (I found myself giggling with glee during some of the fight scenes), playing in a family golf tournament, doing laps in my cousins backyard in a go-cart and going to the Yankees game yesterday with my cousin Paul. To top it all off, I found that the XDoclet team has incorporated my enhancement to allow generating Struts' Forms from POJO's. That ROCKS - Thanks Mathias!

The Apple Store called and said my laptop is finished, so I will pick it up on the way to the airport. I just hope I choose not to take it with me - vacation is so much better without it.

7th inning stretch