Raible Designs

What's wrong with JSF

The developers of Seam have come up with a list of major issues with JSF. I'm assuming many of these issues are fixed by Seam, but it's interesting to note how they've somewhat admitted that JSF has many flaws. Note that there's a lot of references to Struts and WebWork.

Hopefully many of these will be fixed in JSF 2. If REST support is an important feature for web frameworks, it'll be be interesting to see how the component frameworks handle it. It'd be great if they provided native support. Oh wait, then they'd be action-based frameworks.

Why such a busy week?

Lance sent me the following e-mail this morning:

Just saw your status message, I think you'd better blog an explanation!

"Matt Raible is getting ready for one of the busiest weeks of his life."

I couldn't think of a good reason not to blog an explanation, so here goes.

I'm currently sitting at Denver's airport ready to hop on a flight to Mountain View. I'll be at LinkedIn's HQ for two days helping tidy up plans for a release in early September that I'm in charge of. It's my first time being a Release Owner, but it should be pretty painless so I'm not too worried. Whenever I travel to Mountain View, I always have a good time, but I'm constantly being pulled into meetings, or arranging meetings myself. I have a presentation to write that I'm delivering on Wednesday. It describes the changes we've made to make the backend of LinkedIn much more stateless and therefore better and faster.

In my hotel room at night, I'll be writing my presentations for the Colorado Software Summit. Having to write 3 presentations in one week always makes me feel super-busy.

On Wednesday night, I fly home late (likely after a game of hoops with co-workers). Thursday is Jack's birthday, so I hope to take the day off and spend the day with him. Thursday night is sleepover night. Being a single parent with two kids is never easy, but always fun. Friday it's back to work, wrapping up things for the week (status reports, bug fixes, etc.) and likely marveling at the traffic from the DNC.

Friday night there's a 9-hour cocktail party with a good friend from Vancouver, BC.

Saturday is the super-busy day. It's time for Jack's birthday party and if last year is any evidence, it's one of those 8-hour cleaning and decorating situations.

I'm sure I'll have a busier week sometime in the future, but this one will surely be one to remember (especially since it's blogged into history now ).

New Passport in 9 Days

A couple of month ago, I discovered my passport was missing. I looked all around my house but couldn't find it anywhere. Since I'm going to Munich in September, I had to get a new one. So last week, I went to Denver's Downtown Post Office, filled out an application, gave them an original birth certificate, got pictures taken - the whole ball of wax. It cost me around $100 and didn't take more than 30 minutes.

I was amazed when my new passport arrived yesterday in the mail. That's a mere 9-day turnaround! The last time I had to get a new passport, it cost me $350, but I also got it in 2 days. It's good to see getting new passports is an efficient process these days.

EhCache Project Busy this Summer

The EhCache project appears to be having a very busy summer. EhCache 1.5.0 (a major new version) was released on July 12th. In addition, a new (SOAP-based) EhCache Server was released at the end of July. You might ask yourself why you'd need such a beast. I think Greg explains it best:

Why am I doing this? There are lots of theories that have made their way on to the ehcache mailing list. The prosaic truth is that a large US corporate using ehcache for their Java apps on 200+ servers also wants to use it for their C++ apps. And they are prepared to sponsor development. The Web Services API lets them do it. That's it.

As to the larger question of how interesting this is to the world at large, my view is not very. However having to jump through all the hoops to get a server infrastructure done, I thought that the world at large may be interested in a RESTful, resource oriented ehcache server.

The next day, Greg announces EhCache for JRuby on Rails. A few days later, RESTful, resource-oriented caching becomes available in ehcache-server.

I guess this helps answer the question about OSCache vs. EhCache. OSCache hasn't had a release in over a year and EhCache is pumping out new releases and new products. Well done, Greg!

At LinkedIn, we use EhCache for many of our caching needs. However, it's likely we'll be moving to Memcached in the future. Since I'll be part of the team that implements Memcached, it'll be interesting to see which one performs better.

Spontaneous Stuff Weekend

This weekend, I didn't have much planned to do with the kids. I had a couple ideas, but nothing set in stone. The good news is the kids were full of ideas and we kept ourselves plenty occupied. On Saturday, we went to Elitch Gardens. We rode the Light Rail and my stomach barely survived the 4-hour journey.

I was pleased to find out they served beer at Elitches, but regretted it shortly after as I was spinning with the kids in the Tea Cups. But that wasn't the worst ride. The worst one was Thunderbolt - that was the one I had to go on back-to-back with each kid (b/c they weren't tall enough to ride alone). Shortly after getting off, I realized I'd left my iPhone on the ride. Luckily, I rushed back to the ride and the operator was able to find my car and grab it from a very happy teenager.

Today we decided it'd be fun to take a hike. We gathered everyone in the car and drove just past Idaho Springs to St. Mary's Glacier. It was a nice 1.5 mile round-trip hike and both the kids and Cookie (the dog) had a great time. I was pretty impressed with the kids' ability to hike, especially over all the big rocks on the trail. Of course, when I told them they did so well, it only took Abbie 2 seconds to process and respond with "does that mean we get toys?"

Awesome Birthday Present: A Kegerator

I'm proud to say I have the best parents in the world. For my birthday this year, they bought me a kegerator. It was delivered last week, but I didn't get a chance to put it together until this weekend. I've never had so much fun putting together an appliance.

Since it's summer and I'm in Colorado, I decided to get a keg of Sunshine Wheat to start things off. So far, there's issues with 1) too much head and 2) it's not quite cold enough. I think the first can be fixed by playing with the CO2 tank and settings. The 2nd might only be fixable by moving it inside. If you have a kegerator and have advice on how to fix these issues, please let me know.

Why did your parents buy you a kegerator?

There's actually a good reason for this. A few years ago, Julie and I made an agreement that I could buy a kegerator when I paid off the last of my student loans. While Julie and I aren't a couple anymore, it still seemed like a good idea. I paid off my last student loan in June. However, it wasn't my loan, it was my Mom's. When I was applying for colleges way back in the early nineties, my parents said I could go to DU, but only if I paid for it.

My Mom took out quite a few loans over the years to help with tuition, and I finally paid them all off. When I was with my parents over the 4th, I joked that they should buy me a kegerator since I was paying off their loans. Lo and behold, my subliminal messages worked and I ended up with a tap at my house. I couldn't be happier.

Update: Speaking of birthdays, this is the first post I've had to start the 7th year of this blog. My first post was on August 1, 2002.

Update 2 on Friday: I haven't had a beer from the kegerator since Sunday. This evening I poured a fresh one and I'm happy to report the head and temperature issues seem to be fixed.

Maven Plugin for Running Integration Tests against Multiple Containers

Don Brown has created a pretty cool Maven plugin that allows you to run integration tests on multiple containers in one go. I learned about it on the Struts 2 Dev List:

I've started adding functional tests to Struts 2 by adding a few to the REST showcase application, running against Tomcat 5.x, Jetty 6.x, JBoss 4.2.x, and Resin 3.x. The magic happens through a new Maven 2 plugin I developed called maven-itblast-plugin, which enables multiple integration test runs against multiple containers in one go. For more info, see http://github.com/mrdon/maven-itblast-plugin/wikis/home.

You might notice that this plugin is hosted on GitHub. If you want to learn how to use GitHub with Maven, you might want to see Don's entry on Maven-enabled project hosting with GitHub. Thanks Don - good stuff.

Update: Don has posted more information about this plugin on his blog.

Presenting Web Frameworks of the Future Tomorrow in Denver

Tomorrow (Thursday) night, I'll be doing an encore presentation of my Web Frameworks of the Future at DeRailed. If you're in Denver and would like to hear me ramble while drinking a beer, join us at Forestroom 5 at 6:30.

After the last few days, I'm happy to report I should be in good enough condition to pull this off. If you're curious to learn more about my experience at OSCON and this presentation, please see my writeup on the LinkedIn Blog.

My OSCON Aftermath

Last week, I had a great time at OSCON '08. However, I've been paying the toll ever since. For the 5 days prior to OSCON, I stayed up late working on my presentation. I was furiously trying to develop an application with Rails, Grails, Flex and GWT. In the ~30 hours I spent developing the application (Rich Resume), I was able to finish the Rails and Grails pieces, but didn't get much farther than "Hello World" with Flex and GWT.

Even though I had my kids the weekend before OSCON, I still managed to get 4 hours of sleep each night. The next couple nights were no better. On the day of my presentation, I started to feel sick. Luckily, it didn't affect my talk and it never really hit me until the next day. On Thursday, I woke up with swollen tonsils and the feeling of an oncoming cold. I attended the conference on Thursday and went to bed early to get lots of rest.

On Friday, things weren't improving, but they weren't getting any worse either. My family and I attended the Oregon Brewers Festival and had a great time. Yes, I actually survived taking my kids to a Beer Fest for several hours. That evening, we stayed the night at the Kennedy School and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Again, I went to bed early as the kids and I had a 7:30 AM flight the next morning.

On Saturday, I started to lose my voice and my cold was still bearing down on me like an avalanche. I drove up to Vail for a friend's wedding on Saturday night. Of course, I stayed up too late and drank too much, but I did have a heckuva a good time.

When I woke up Sunday, I was in bad shape. The hangover wasn't bad, it was the body aches (from the cold) and the fact that my right eye was draining and it hurt to open it. A friend had to drive me home because I couldn't put my contacts in. I went to bed when I got home (around 5) and didn't wake up until noon the next day (Monday). I called in sick yesterday and went to the ER in the afternoon (I couldn't find a doctor who'd have me). The doctor in the ER said it was Pink Eye and gave me some drops to make it better. I came home, took a nap and crashed for the night a couple hours later.

I called in sick again today. I woke up around 9 this morning, took a nap 10 minutes later and finally woke up around 1:30 this afternoon feeling halfway decent. The body aches aren't nearly as bad as they were and my eye is no longer draining.

The worst part of this whole thing is I lost my glasses a couple months ago so I've been living w/o good vision for 3 days. I can read things 12 inches from me, but watching TV doesn't work too well. Since I can't wear my contacts for 7 days, I hopped on my bike and rode to the nearest LensCrafters to get a new pair of glasses. Those are scheduled to be done in the next 5 minutes (I'm typing this at the Apple Store in Cherry Creek Mall) and I'll finally be able to see again.

Lessons Learned: Sleep is important, get lots of it. Don't get Pink Eye and a cold at the same time. If you wear contacts, make sure you have a backup pair of glasses for when you get Pink Eye.

OSCON 2008 Wrapup

This week, I attended OSCON 2008 in Portland, Oregon. I talked to someone who thought the conference had a very small Java presence. I noticed this too, but that's how it's always been. Interestingly enough, they also thought it had a small Ruby showing. I guess Perl, Python and PHP will always dominate OSCON. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. I've always admired OSCON for the diversity of developers and languages.

Below is a list of my entries for all the sessions I attended.

• The Keynote with Tim O'Reilly, Christine Peterson and Dirk Hohndel
• An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks by Ryan Carmelo Briones
• Google XML Pages (GXP) by Harry Heymann and Laurence Gonsalves
• Caching and Performance: Lessons from Facebook by Lucas Nealan
• Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grails and Rails (my presentation)
• The State of Lightning Talks
• CSS for High Performance JavaScript UI by Gavin Doughtie
• Even Faster Web Sites by Steve Souders

If you attended OSCON, did you enjoy the show? What was your favorite session? I'd love to hear other's impressions of the conference and how it could be improved.