Raible Designs

My Eye Surgery Experience

On May 7, I visited my local TLC Laser Eye Center for eye surgery. I began looking into eye surgery way back in December. At that time, I wore my glasses for a week, then waltzed into my local TLC and tried to get it done the next day. I quickly found out that 1) it wasn't possible for 2 weeks and 2) I couldn't ski for a couple weeks afterward. Since we were in the midst of a great ski season, I decided to schedule it for May.

I failed the LASIK-eligibility and learned I'd have to have PRK instead. The scars on my right eyeball caused me to fail. I received these scars as a boy when a friend and I blew up a .45-70 bullet with a nail and sledgehammer. I was the one holding the nail and couldn't see for the next 3 days.

In a nutshell: with LASIK they cut a flap, lift it up and shoot the laser under it. It heals quickly and is relatively painless. PRK has been around since before LASIK. With PRK, they seem to shave your eyeball and then shoot a laser into it. PRK takes a lot longer to heal, but the results are often as good or better than LASIK. Wikipedia has a more technical PRK vs. LASIK reference.

The Procedure
My mom flew into town for my surgery and drove me to TLC's office on that Thursday morning. It took 2 hours to prep for surgery, with most of the time spent sitting around and talking to my mom. Finally, they asked her to sit in the lobby and took me back to a waiting area. When I walked in the room, there were 2 other patients with surgery gear (funny hat and booties) and masks. They were leaning back, looking at the ceiling with their masks on and eyes closed. I quickly became the 3rd person who looked like this. Right before they started putting drops in my eyes, I remember being terrified that I might never see daylight again. At the very least, I thought I wouldn't see anything but black for the next 3 days.

Right before they called me in, the previous patient walked out and muttered "Damn, that burns." Believe me, this is not what you want to hear right before it's your turn. I was led into the operating room, sat down and received numbing drops in my eyes. Less than a minute later, I was led over to the operating table.

The rest of the procedure lasted less than 5 minutes. They taped my left eye shut and told me to stare at the red light with my right eye. At this point, they used some contraption to shave my eyeball. It was slightly painful, similar to the mild pain you feel when getting a cavity drilled with Novocaine. After each stroke, the world would ripple like a pebble thrown in a lake. After 10 strokes or so, they shot a laser into my eye for around 20 seconds. You don't actually see the laser (the red light looks the same), but you can smell your eyeball burning. Each eye only took a few minutes. My mom was able to watch the entire surgery on a television on the other side of a glass wall.

The Recovery
I was surprised to discover I was immediately able to open my eyes and see normally. Of course, my eyes felt heavy, so I didn't open them wide nor feel like I could. I was led back to the waiting room where I was given a Valium and sent home. I put my sunglasses on when we left and kept my eyes closed for the 5-minute drive home. After arriving at my house, I immediately downed some Tylenol PM and went to bed. It was hard to fall asleep and my eyes began tearing up. There was a dull pain in my eyes that kept the tears flowing for most of the afternoon. It took me 2 hours to fall asleep and I remember my eyes causing my nose to get stuffed up from all the tears.

When I woke up that evening, everything was blurry, but I was able to open my eyes and see better than I had previously w/o glasses. I didn't expect anything in the form of good vision and was mostly pre-occupied with trying to stop the pain (which wasn't terrible, but definitely present). I was prescribed Vicodin and started taking it on a regular basis. I was completely unable to watch TV at all that night. Viewing the computer screen was unthinkable.

The next morning, my vision was a lot better as evidenced by the tweet from my iPhone. Shortly after, my mom drove me to my eye doctor's office for a 1-day checkup. The results were surprising.

Friday night was one of the most painful. Saturday wasn't very painful, but my eyesight was very blurry. That afternoon, it was hard to keep my eyes open. Every time I tried to open them, I felt like I had to sneeze. Fortunately, I was able to watch the Nuggets game. I couldn't see players' numbers, but I was able to see Melo's last-second 3-pointer to win.

On Monday, I was able to drive to TLC for my 3-day checkup. Things were definitely blurry, but I didn't feel like it was dangerous for me to be behind the wheel. I was able to work on Monday, but I also had to increase my font sizes to 36pt and used a 30" monitor all day. OS X's Universal Access -> Zoom feature came in awful handy. That night, TV was a LOT clearer than the previous night, but it was still fuzzy.

What's it like now?
It's been almost 4 weeks and I'm very glad that I had the surgery done. I haven't felt any pain since the Sunday after surgery and I haven't had any issues with dryness. My vision does fluctuate from day-to-day. Some days I feel like I have super-hero vision and other days there's a halo around objects beyond 10 feet. According to my doctor, fluctuations are expected to continue for 6 months. I don't mind since it never gets bad enough to seem strange.

Now I enjoy not having to worry about glasses or contacts when traveling. I love waking up every morning and not having to do anything to improve my vision. I feel like I have more freedom in my life. Getting eye surgery is definitely one of the best things I've ever done.

Ryan and Breanne's Wedding in Playa del Carmen

Despite the warnings about Swine Flu, two weeks ago I flew to Cancun for my good friends' Ryan and Breanne's wedding. I didn't get much sleep the night before, but managed to get a good nap on the plane. We arrived in Cancun around 2:00pm and begin enjoying the beautiful weather of Mexico. We took a shuttle from CUN to the all-inclusive Paraiso Maya. Thanks to Swine Flu, we got upgraded twice and ended up paying $110/night for a place that's normally $450/night.

My two favorite parts of the trip were 1) the people and 2) the place. There was around 15 of us, many of which have been good friends since college. We stayed at the Paraiso Maya, which was a very nice hotel with beautiful pools, elaborate buffets and awesome beach access. We had a ton of fun at the pool bar, playing water basketball, jet skiing and playing beach volleyball. The dinners at the Steakhouses were great and The Galaxy (Star War themed) club created many good memories. It's great to travel with that many people, especially when the beer is flowing for (what seems like) free and you're partying with old friends.

My third favorite part of the trip was watching the Nuggets vs. Lakers games. We watched 3 games in the resort's "Sports Bar" and had a blast doing it. Since we had a couple Lakers' fans in the mix, it made things interesting.

We spent 3 days at the pool and on the beach before the wedding happened on Saturday. It was a very cool ceremony and we enjoyed a Mariachi band for a good hour afterward. I've definitely become a big fan of beach weddings in the last 6 months.

After 5 days in Playa del Carmen, my buddy (Kevin Navarro) and I spent 2 days at The Westin in Cancun. This was a very nice resort; especially since we had an ocean-front room.

I had so much fun on this trip, I've been inspired to learn Spanish. I don't know when I'll carve out the time to do it, but I know I'll return to Mexico several times, so the sooner the better.

To see all my pictures from this trip, see my Mexico 2009 Collection on Flickr.

Life Update: New Treehouse, New Kittens and More

It's been awhile since I wrote a life update post so here you go. After returning from Jason and Holly's Wedding in Florida, I took the next week off to "catch up on life". Having a vacation at home with no packing and lots of time to wipe my "to do" list clean was great. Not only that, but the weather was beautiful all week. If you ever get a chance to take a "catch up on life" vacation, I highly recommend it.

New Treehouse
I started out the week by doing something I've been telling the kids I'd do for the last year: building a treehouse. I used this tutorial as a guide for the "foundation" and had a lot of fun doing it. The best part was discovering my Dad had stocked my garage with many tools over the last couple years. I had to make several runs to Home Depot and Ace Hardware for building supplies, but rarely had to buy any new tools. My Dad has been a carpenter for over 30 years (he used to do it for a living in Montana). I was pleasantly surprised to discover some of his skills have rubbed off on me. We still need to build the structure on top of the platform, but everyone is happy with the results so far.

AppFuse
After finishing Phase 1 of the treehouse, I started working on the next version of AppFuse. I've made good progress so far:

• Archetypes now include all the source from web modules.
• Archetypes are now created using archetype:create-from-project, making things easier to maintain.
• Switched Cargo from downloaded Tomcat to embedded Jetty, allowing for faster builds.
• Upgraded to Struts 2.1.6 and Tapestry 5.0.18.

There's still lots of open issues, but I believe there's a lot of value in starting the "working on the next version" process. With the way things are shaping up, I'm considering bumping the version to 2.5 or 3.0 instead of 2.1. 3.0 might be a little ambitious, but there are going to be a lot of improvements.

New Kittens
Last weekend, I decided it was time to create some happy kids and get some pets in my house. On Saturday, we set out on a quest to find some kittens. We visited a couple shelters and a couple pet stores, but came home empty handed. We didn't look Sunday because we had more important things to do. On Monday, we hit up craigslist and found our kittens with a family in Thornton. Upon arrival, I figured they'd be good since the family had a 6-year old, a 4-year old and a 1-year old that was carrying a kitten around by the tail. At least their new home is slightly less chaotic than their last one.

Eye Surgery
Today is my last day wearing glasses. Tomorrow morning, I'm scheduled to receive PRK eye surgery at TLC Laser Eye Center. I'm nervous about the procedure and dreading the recovery. My mom is flying in tonight to assist me while I'm blind and in pain, so hopefully it won't be too bad. A co-worker has lots of books on tape that I'm borrowing to pass the time.

My life is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon, but I will have lots of opportunities to relax. In two weeks, I'm heading to Cancun for a friend's wedding. Having a week on the sunny beaches of Mexico is always fun. My current contract expires a couple days after my return. I'm currently negotiating with a few potential clients and hope to have my summer work plans solidified before leaving for Mexico. More than anything, I'm looking forward to taking the entire month of July off and spending it at our cabin in Montana. My Dad is moving up there to work on The New Cabin and there's nothing I'd rather do than help him out.

Ajax Framework Analysis Results

Way back in January, I wrote about how my colleagues and I were evaluating Ajax frameworks to build a SOFEA-style architecture. To make our choice, we used the following process:

1. Choose a short list of frameworks to prototype with.
2. Create an application prototype with each framework.
3. Document findings and create a matrix with important criteria.
4. Create presentation to summarize document.
5. Deliver document, presentation and recommendation.

When I wrote that entry, we had just finished step 2 and were starting step 3. I first wrote this blog post a week later, when we delivered step 5. Here is the comparison and conclusion sections of the analysis document we composed.

Framework Comparison
In order to evaluate the different frameworks against important criteria, we created a matrix with weights and ranks for each framework. This matrix shows how our weighting and rankings lead us to the winner for our project. You can view this matrix online or see below for a summary.

Note: Criteria whose values were identical across all candidates were weighted at zero. Charting capability was weighted at zero b/c we decided to use Flash for this.

This matrix indicates that GWT is the best candidate for our team to develop SOFEA-style applications with. In addition to the matrix, below are graphs that illustrate interesting (and possibly meaningless) statistics about each project.

Conclusion
After working with the various frameworks, we believe that all the frameworks were very good and could be used to write applications with. If all weights are equal, these frameworks were almost even when compared against our evaluation criteria. The graph below illustrates this.

Even after applying the weighted criteria, the evenness doesn't change a whole lot.

Without considering the even or weighted criteria, we believe the decision all comes down to what the developers on the project feel they will be most comfortable with. If you're developing with Dojo or YUI, chances are you're dressing up existing HTML and possibly using progressive enhancement to add more rich functionality. On the other hand, Ext JS and GWT are similar to Swing programming where you build the UI with code (JavaScript for Ext JS, Java for GWT).

The tools available for JavaScript development have gotten increasingly better in recent years. IntelliJ IDEA has a JavaScript Editor that provides many of the same features as its Java editor. Aptana Studio also has excellent support for authoring and debugging JavaScript. However, we believe the Java debugging and authoring support in IDEs is much better. Furthermore, we are more familiar with organizing code in Java projects and feel more comfortable in this development environment.

Based on this evaluation, we believe that GWT is the best framework for our team to develop SOFEA-style applications with.

Flash Forward to Today...
The core GWT library from Google doesn't have a whole lot of widgets, nor do they look good out-of-the-box. So early on, we experimented with two alternative implementations that continue to leverage GWT concepts and tools:

• GXT: a GWT version of Ext JS
• SmartGWT: a GWT version of SmartClient

Unfortunately, over the past few months, we've found that both of these implementations are too heavy for our requirements, mostly because of the file size of the generated JavaScript code. For example, a feature I wrote generated a 275K *.cache.html file using GXT. After determining that was too slow to give users the initial "pop", I re-wrote it without GXT. After a day, we had an application with *.cache.html files of 133K. Yes, that's over a 50% reduction in size!*

Because of these findings, we are proceeding with the core GWT library from Google and adding in new components as needed. It is cool to know you can make a UI "pop" with GWT, as long as you stick to the core - close-to-the-metal - components. For those applications that can afford an initial "loading..." state, I'd definitely recommend looking at GXT and SmartGWT.

* To make refactoring easier, I copied GXT MVC into our source tree and modified all imports.

Jason and Holly's Wedding was a blast!

This past weekend, I experienced an incredible 4 days in West Palm Beach, Florida. When Julie and I got married there in April 2000, we had so much fun that we always wanted to do it again. We had a lot of good friends and family fly in for the wedding. If you've ever experienced a beach holiday with many good friends, you'll know what I'm talking about. Julie is Holly's sister and Jason (her new husband) is one of my fraternity brothers. That means I knew both sides of the wedding party and it very much resembled the reunion we always wanted.

I flew down on Thursday morning after a little bit of oversleeping. Because I flew into Orlando, I had to rent a car and drive 2 hours to West Palm. This wasn't so bad since I got hooked up with a convertible and it was a beautiful 80°F on the drive. That night, I picked up Abbie and Jack from "Grammy's" house and they spent the night with me in my hotel.

The next morning, we woke up and headed to Sailfish for a ride on a friend's boat. After a couple hours on the intercostal, we played in the pool, enjoyed the sun and started getting ready for the Rehearsal Dinner.

During the Rehearsal Dinner, a friend (Navarro) and I were bartenders while Abbie was in charge of making sure everyone's drinks were full. Below are some of my favorite pictures from Friday night.

After the rehearsal dinner, the party crowd headed to Rum Bar and had lots of laughs and played many games of "hook". On the wedding day (Saturday), we took another boat ride, hung out on the beach and enjoyed a beautiful ceremony on the beach.

The rest of the night was spent dancing and enjoying everyone's company. The party didn't end that night though. Sunday, Holly and Julie's mom had a brunch at her house where we all laid by the pool, played with the kids and sipped on many cold drinks. At sunset, we walked down to the beach so Mr. and Mrs. Harris could get some sand from their ceremony location.

It was a spectacular weekend with lots of good friends and a ton of great memories. Congratulations Jason and Holly!

For more pictures, see Flickr or Facebook.

My Drunk on Software Interview

Back in February, I met up with James Ward and Jon Rose for a Drunk on Software interview. We enjoyed some good beer and had a great conversation about SOFEA, open source and RIA. See larger video here.

Congratulations on Retiring Dad!

Today is a very special day in my Dad's life. Today is his last day of work. Within the next hour, Joseph Edward Raible, Jr. will officially become retired and subsequently one of the happiest people I know. My dad has always had an interesting relationship with work. I've never met someone who hated working for The Man more, yet had such a strong work ethic.

Growing up in Montana, my dad always had the shittiest jobs. When I was a toddler, he used to walk several miles to work, often during the cruel Montana winters. As I got older, I remember him working as a carpenter, logger, trail crew specialist, firefighter, radio technician and even a programmer. The reason his jobs were so shitty is because he told us they were. I don't think he made over $5/hour until I was in the second grade.

He was able to turn his career around in impressive fashion in the early 90s. He'd always been a "computer guy" at the cabin. He even went to Graduate School for his Masters in Computer Science. When we moved to Oregon, he volunteered at my mom's new office as a Network Administrator. After 6 months, they hired him and he quickly moved up the ranks. I believe his current title is something fancy like Director of Wireless Communications. Over the last 19 years, he's worked for the BLM and done amazing things like setup radio networks in Honduras and Tanzania. He's turned into quite the world traveler.

The thing I remember the most is his perseverance. One winter when he couldn't find work, he built a barn. From scratch, mostly by himself.

The other thing I remember well is how much he complained about work. It was never the actual work that he complained about, it was the "stupid fuckin' idiots" that he had to work with (or for). This is the reason that this is such a special day. I can't help but think a huge weight is being lifted from his shoulders and he's going to much happier. Then again, you know how these things go - he might actually miss having people around to complain about.

One thing's for sure, I'm super pumped and happy for the guy. He plans on moving back to Montana for the summer to work on the New Cabin and it's likely I'll get to spend a lot more time with him in the coming years.

Congratulations and cheers to you Dad. You did it. I'm extremely proud of you today.

New Office and New Bike

Back in January, I moved into a new office to work on my current project. The following week, my bike was stolen. The next day I ran to work and decided to do it for a couple months.

My current goal is to run until April 1st or until I lose 20 pounds, whichever comes first.

The next week, my co-worker's bike was stolen and I knew I had to stick with my goal. The significance of April 1st was that our office lease expires on April 1st and we were planning on moving to a new office. While our office is nice, it is a large one-room office with no windows. The previous office was quite a bit cooler, but also cost twice as much.

A couple of weeks ago, we found a nice office near downtown. I signed a 1-year lease and moved in over the weekend. For folks in Denver, you might recognize the nice location.

I did my final run to work last Thursday, in the midst the Blizzard of 2009. While running to work was a great experiment and I enjoyed telling people I was doing it, it wasn't fun. I've been riding my bike to work for many years (first year was 1999). The one thing I've always enjoyed was the thrill of the ride in the morning. On a beautiful spring day, it's really a fantastic experience. It's easily been the best part of any job I've ever had.

With the new office secured and the running mission completed, I walked over to my favorite bike shop and picked up a Trek FX 7.5 yesterday. To research and figure out which bike to buy, I asked my network on LinkedIn.

As luck would have it, my first ride to the new office was today and we woke up to a morning snow storm. Even though the ride was cold and wet, I still had a blast. I've enjoyed riding since I traversed the hills on a BMX bike back in Montana. Getting back in the saddle today was simply awesome and I can't wait to ride again tomorrow, regardless of the weather. I know those nice spring days are just around the corner.

Optimizing a GWT Application with Multiple EntryPoints

Building a GWT application is an easy way for Java Developers to write Ajax applications. However, it can be difficult to release a GWT application to production before it's finished. One of the most important things I've learned in Software Development is to get a new application into production as soon as possible. Not only does getting it from dev → qa → prod verify your process works, it also can do a lot to test the viability of the new application.

One of the biggest issues with GWT applications is size. The project I'm working on compiles Java to JavaScript and creates ~570K *.cache.html files (one for each modern browser). These files end up being around 180K gzipped. I believe this is an OK size for an entire application. However, if you're going to release early, release often with GWT, chances are you'll just want to release one feature at a time.

When the first feature was completed on my project, the *.cache.html files were around 300K. Rather than using branches to release to QA and UAT, bug fixes and new features were developed on trunk. Unfortunately, the QA and UAT process took several weeks longer than expected so by the time the feature was ready to release, the *.cache.html files had grown to around ~570K. The reason the file had grown so much was because it included all of the other features.

Earlier this week, while running to a dentist appointment, I thought of a solution to this problem. The basic idea was to optimize the compilation process so only the to-be-released feature was included. Even better, the solution didn't require more modularization. The results:

Before: *.cache.html -> 569K, gzipped 175K
After: *.cache.html -> 314K, gzipped 100K

According to my calculations, that's a 56% reduction in size. How did I do it?

1. Created a new FeatureName.java EntryPoint with only the to-be-released features imported.
2. Created a new FeatureName.gwt.xml that references the new EntryPoint.
3. Copied old (kitchen-sink) EntryPoint.html to FeatureName.html and changed the reference to the nocache.js file.
4. Created a Maven profile that allows using -PFeatureName to build a FeatureName-only module.

One downside to doing things this way is it's possible to create a WAR that has the same name and different features. Surely the Maven Overlords would frown upon this. Since this is just a temporary solution to release features incrementally, I'm not too worried about it. A possible workaround is to create different WAR names when a feature's profile is activated. I believe the true "Maven way" would be to make the "kitchen sink" application into a JAR and have several WAR modules with the different EntryPoints. Seems a bit complicated to me.

Other than this Maven publishing issue, the only other issue I can foresee is keeping the two EntryPoints and HTML files in synch. Then again, the separate files allow a feature to be customized for the release and can be deleted when its no longer needed.

What do you think? Do you know of a better way to compile a GWT application so it only contains certain features?

Modularizing GWT Applications with GWT-Maven

Last week, I spent some time modularizing the GWT application I'm working on. By modularizing, I mean splitting the code from one GWT module into a "core" and "webapp" module. The reason for doing this was so the "core" module could be used by another GWT application. Creating GWT Modules is fairly straightforward, but it wasn't as intuitive as expected when using the gwt-maven-plugin.

The hardest part of moving the code was figuring out how to run tests in the new "core" module. After getting it all working, it seems easy enough. Hopefully this post will make it easy for others. Here's the steps I'd recommend:

1. Convert your GWT project into a multi-module project where you have a top-level pom.xml and two sub-modules (e.g. gwt-core and gwt-webapp).
2. Do the normal single-to-multi-project Maven stuff like declaring the <parent> element in the modules and moving plugins/dependencies to the top-level pom.xml.
3. Refactor your gwt-webapp project to push down all shared classes (and their tests) to gwt-core.
4. In the gwt-core project, include *.xml and *.java in your JAR so GWT can extract/compile the source code when building gwt-webapp.

   <resources>
       <resource>
           <directory>src/main/java</directory>
           <includes>
               <include>**/*.java</include>
               <include>**/*.xml</include>
           </includes>
       </resource>
   </resources>
   

5. In gwt-core/src/main/java, create a Core.gwt.xml that references the modules you'd like to use in all your applications. For example:

   <module>
       <inherits name="com.google.gwt.user.User"/>
       <inherits name="com.google.gwt.i18n.I18N"/>
       <inherits name="com.extjs.gxt.ui.GXT"/>
       <inherits name="pl.rmalinowski.gwt2swf.GWT2SWF"/>
   </module>
   

6. Now the tricky part begins, mostly because of how the gwt-maven plugin currently works. In src/test/java, create a NoOpEntryPoint.gwt.xml that inherits your Core module and defines an EntryPoint.

   <module>
       <inherits name="com.company.app.Core"/>
       <entry-point class="com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint"/>
   </module>
   

7. Create a NoOpEntryPoint.java class in the same directory as NoOpEntryPoint.gwt.xml.

   public class NoOpEntryPoint implements EntryPoint {
       
       public void onModuleLoad() {
           // do nothing
       }
   }
   

8. In any class that extends GWTTestCase (I usually create a parent class for all tests), reference the NoOpEntryPoint in the getModuleName() method.

       @Override
       public String getModuleName() {
           return "com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint";
       }
   

9. Lastly, in the gwt-maven plugin's configuration (in gwt-core/pom.xml), reference the NoOpEntryPoint in <compileTargets>, a non-existent file in <runTarget> and only the "test" goal in the executions.

   <plugin>
       <groupId>com.totsp.gwt</groupId>
       <artifactId>maven-googlewebtoolkit2-plugin</artifactId>
       <version>2.0-beta26</version>
       <configuration>
           <compileTargets>
               <value>com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint</value>
           </compileTargets>
           <runTarget>com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint/doesntexist.html</runTarget>
           <logLevel>INFO</logLevel>
           <style>OBF</style>
           <noServer>false</noServer>
           <extraJvmArgs>-Xmx512m</extraJvmArgs>
           <gwtVersion>${gwtVersion}</gwtVersion>
           <testFilter>*GwtTestSuite.java</testFilter>
           <testSkip>${skipTests}</testSkip>
       </configuration>
       <executions>
           <execution>
               <goals>
                   <goal>test</goal>
               </goals>
           </execution>
       </executions>
   </plugin>
   

The results of modularizing your application are beneficial (shared code) and detrimental (you have to mvn install gwt-core whenever you make changes in shared classes). If you know of a way to configure the gwt-maven plugin to read sources from both gwt-core and gwt-webapp in hosted mode, I'd love to hear about it.