Raible Designs

Our Jeep at DIA.

I made it! :-D

The Trip Home

I'm in the Seattle airport right now. My flight to Denver is still planning to go, but I have my doubts. It departs in about 40 minutes. The only Alaskan Airlines flight out of Denver was cancelled this morning (due to weather). Listening to some passengers next to me - the rumor is that we're going to try to "bust in" through the cloud over Denver when there's a break. If there's no break, then we'll fly back to Salt Lake City to refuel, try again, and if no luck, we'll come back to Seattle. Man would that suck - let's hope we get in on the first try! I'd better charge up this laptop battery - maybe I should try to rent a movie somewhere or something.

This post was made possible by my Amex card and the Wayport network in this airport.

Update: It's been confirmed by the airline that the scenario I described above is indeed the plan. If we can't get into Denver, we'll refuel in Salt Lake City or Boise (Idaho), then they'll try again. If unsuccesfull, we'll return to Seattle and we're on our own for lodging and other ammenities tonight. The only good thing about this adventure - Alaska Airlines has free microbrews (beer) on all their flights. Too bad I get sick when I drink and fly. :(

Denver: Winter Weather Bulletin

I'm scheduled to fly back home to Denver tomorrow. I'm supposed to leave from Wanatchee (the Apple Capital of the World!) and get into Denver around 6:00 p.m. However, I just received this Winter Weather Bulletin from a Denver User Group:

SNOW IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE IN THE MOUNTAINS THROUGH TONIGHT...
TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY. SNOW WILL BECOME HEAVY AT TIMES. STORM
TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 3 TO 8 FEET WILL BE POSSIBLE ON EASTERN
SLOPES OF THE MOUNTAINS AND IN THE FRONT RANGE FOOTHILLS.

3 TO 8 FEET?!! That's the sweetest thing I've ever heard. Now I just have to figure out a way to get up skiing this week. Maybe they'll shut down the city, I won't have to go to work, and it'll be chest deep powder!!! Yeeee haaawww, I haven't been so excited since Abbie was born!

What to do with my Chapters?

Julie suggested I just post them on this site. Then I got to thinking - what if all the authors made a PDF version of the book, and it was downloadable as the whole thing or as selected chapters. Let's say $5/chapter and you can pick and choose whichever ones you want. Sounds like a good idea, but the problem would be protecting the PDFs from being shipped around between friends. Or we could just give them away, in hopes that our knowledge would inspire others to hire us (as in a new job or a new book).

I don't know what to do, but I'd like to get my chapters out somehow. I'm afraid that if I just sit and wait, they'll never get out, and the technology will be old news shortly. The stuff I wrote about has staying power, but only until the next version of XDoclet and Struts.

I guess the good news is that I'll keep struts-resume up to date with the latest version, but the writing will be out of date by the end of the year.

Wireless in Chelan

My dad and I did some work this afternoon and setup a wireless network in my sister's place. She got DSL installed last week and it's pretty damn fast. My dad carries a couple of wireless cards on him at all times, so after a little fuddling with the Orinoco card and my Mac, I'm coming to you live from the living room. Very cool!

The one problem I'm having out here is that my phone doesn't have a signal here, so moblogging is kind of tough. I have taken a bunch of pictures though. It's just a pain to copy to phone -> send via bluetooth -> post via e-mail or browser. It's much easier to just e-mail them from the phone. I wonder what'll happen if I attach a bunch of them to an e-mail.

I need an application that I can browse my phone from my Mac. I think Russ has a tool like this - is there one from the Mac? BTW, here's some pictures from yesterday before my cell phone signal died.

RE: Wrox Going Under

Matt hopes for for Professional JSP 2.0:

[Larkware] A couple of weblogs have reported that Wrox is going under. Although at the moment this has to be classed as "credible rumor," it really doesn't surprise me, on two fronts. First, it seems to me that Wrox's strategy for the past year or so has been mainly "throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks."

I really really hope not. I was looking forward to Professional JSP 2.0...

Yeah, I was really looking forward to this book - my first time being published, busting my hump to write just after having a new daughter, among other things. It just sucks. It doesn't really suck for me, it really sucks for the people that actually worked for Wrox. As for Professional JSP 2.0, who the heck knows what'll happen. I really hope it gets published. I also hope to get paid for writing, but that'll probably never happen. If they don't publish it, they probably don't have to pay the authors. I think the book is done though, maybe we can talk them into publishing it... Let's get a petition going!

Or maybe I'll just sell my chapters on eBay.

Struts Training: Week 3

I just signed in for 3rd week here in Struts Training. I'm coming to you live from Chelan, WA. So on with what Ted has to say.

Ted's talking about persistence in Struts: Transaction Script vs. Domain Model.

Transaction Script - organizes business logic by procedure. Great choice for small applications with simple logic. For example, online auction, public search engine or an address book.

Domain Model - an object model of the domain. Has a rich variety of objects that incorporate both data and behavior. Ted mentions that the Domain Model is better for larger applications. For example, managing inventory for an online auction might require using the domain model.

What Ted is doing is using the Domain Model to separate Struts from his Actions - so that he passes around a DomainRequest, DomainResponse, and gets his form from a factory. To me, this looks like a good way to make your Struts layer a lot more complicated! ;-) At the same time, Ted is getting this information from Martin Fowler's Patterns (in Enterprise Architecture, ISBN 0321127420) book, so maybe I should move to the domain model. Naahh, I think I'll keep using the Transaction Script method - it's probably easier for folks to learn and would definitely be easier for rookies to maintain.

Onto Hibernate and how it works:

- POJO beans, encourages fine-grained
- Utilizes "persistence by descriptor"
- Provides DBA-friendly text queries
- Plays well with others
- Buffet-style implementation

IMO, if you're not using Hibernate, you should know why. If you're starting a new project, it's worth looking at. If you're using it, but not using XDoclet - you should be. XDoclet is the best way to avoid DD Hell (quoted from Erik Hatcher).

I didn't know that Hibernate supported a version - did you? Apparently you can specify that a property is a version and Hibernate will use it as you'd expect. Don't see that I have a need for that, but possibly. Would a struts-resume user ever want to keep old versions of their resume? I like to keep old versions of mine, but I have to admit, I never look at them again.

<version name="version" />

Ted just touched on how Hibernate can generate your database schema for you. This is a very powerful feature IMO - especially with struts-resume. It makes it nice for an example app. For instance, with struts-resume, you can run "ant setup-db" and it'll drop tables and re-create your db schema for you.

A student asks about the bottom-up approach - what if you already have a database. My advice? Try looking at Middlegen, its Hibernate Plugin in designed to create an XDoclet-enabled POJO from a database schema. There's also the Reverse Schema Generator that is included with Hibernate. I've used this one and it works great. I've never used Middlegen, but I should be considering that I tag the generated POJO up with XDoclet tags.

Interesting: Ted just mentioned that Gavin (Hibernate's Lead Developer) is working on a book for Manning. It is on Object Relational persistence and it uses Hibernate for its example apps. Erik Hatcher, at his preso on Wednesday, also mentioned that an XDoclet in Action book will be published soon by Manning. He even showed us the book's cover - so I'm assuming it will be published soon.

Hibernate's Fashionable Friends: XDoclet, Commons Logging, Commons DBCP, DynaBeans and Turbine Caching.

To learn more about this Hibernate, checkout:

· AgileData Website (Scott Ambler)
· Hibernate Homepage
· Struts Application Site (Hibernate example and Struts Resume both use Hibernate with Struts)

Vic still likes RowSets and SQL better. I'm guessing this is because he's a SQL expert. The nice thing about Hibernate is that it's query language (HQL) is very much like SQL and allows you to do complex joins. At least, to my knowledge, I've never done any fancy joins in the HQL, just in the mapping (*.hbm.xml) files.

Quote from Ted: This is the year of JUnit books. Watch for them this summer..

Now Ted is covering StrutsTestCase, a JUnit extension that hooks into Struts and Cactus. IMO, it's an awesome way to test Struts Actions - even easier than testing a servlet with Cactus.

Another book: JUnit in Action (Manning) by Vincent Massol and Ted. To be published this summer. Vincent is the lead developer on Cactus, so I expect this to be a great book. Right now, I wish I had written my first book for Manning rather than Wrox. :-(

The one bad part about today's session is that I had to use a calling card to dial in and at $0.35/minute, I'm up to about $25! I should probably sign off soon and save some cash...

Tapestry - are you using it? A student asks about it and Ted mentions that he views it as a presentation framework like Velocity. I've heard lots of good things about it, but have never used it. Ted admits that he uses Velocity and gave up on using JSPs a while ago.

Good stuff - thanks Ted, I'm signing off (the QA session is still in progress).

The Matrix (for App Servers)

TSS has volunteered to host the appserver matrix. This is a nice matrix that I've used in the past while teaching.

TheServerSide is pleased to announce that we will now be hosting the J2EE Application Server Matrix which was formerly available on Flashline.com. The 'Matrix' is a detailed listing of J2EE vendors and their application server products, with information on latest product version numbers, J2EE spec support and licensing, pricing, platform support, and links to product downloads and reviews. [TheServerSide.Com: Your J2EE Community]

Denver Sunrise!