Raible Designs

Is it possible to replace the syntax parser in Eclipse or IDEA's JSP Plugin?

At LinkedIn, we have our own JSP Compiler. Our version of JSP is more like FreeMarker than JSP since it solves many of the deficiencies of JSP. Since we allow a different syntax than standard JSP (more powerful EL, new tags for looping, loading from classpath), we (like FreeMarker) don't get much love from IDEs.

We don't get much in the way of syntax-highlighting or code completion. However, since we use JavaCC/JJTree for parsing, I'm wondering if Eclipse or IDEA (or even NetBeans) allows replacing the default syntax definition with a new one.

Has anyone extended one of these IDEs to enhance its JSP syntax highlighting and compilation? If so, I'd love to hear about it. If not, it's likely we'll be doing it in the near future.

Traveled Coast to Coast Last Week

Last week I traveled from Denver to Mountain View with the UI Frameworks Team. It was the first time all four of us traveled together and we had a great time. On Monday night, I helped LinkedIn Softball beat the only undefeated team in our league. Pitchers were a flowin' at a nearby beer garden afterwards to celebrate.

On Wednesday evening, we returned to Denver and I enjoyed a night with the kids before flying out on Friday to Boston for the American Craft Beer Fest. The flight was no fun as it took me 12 hours door-to-door (on the way home too). I stayed with friends in Concord, Mass. and enjoyed the "country livin'" a whole lot. They had just moved in a few weeks before, and it was awful nice being in an area with huge lots (1 acre +) and neighbors that come over and talk for hours.

On Saturday, we had a great time at the ACBF and even ran into some good friends (Chad and Mike) from Denver. Amazingly enough, both of these guys are going to Oktoberfest at the same time we are. Below are some photos from the festivities (more on Flickr).

On Sunday, we went to the Old North Bridge and learned some fascinating stuff about the beginning of the American Revolution. Did you know that 1/2 of the British Regiment that went to Concord stopped for pints at 9 in the morning? If they hadn't, they would have been able to surprise the Minutemen from behind and the American Revolution may never have happened. I also liked the fact that after the British were fired upon they ran back to town and then had breakfast for a couple hours. Maybe I should modify this Wikipedia page to add these tidbits we learned from our tour guide?

All in all, it was a great week of traveling. The flights to and from Boston were way to long, but the memories I created were worth it. I'll be in Denver all week, enjoying Bike to Work Day on Wednesday and then heading off on vacation for a week. I love summertime.

The Father's Day Camping Trip

This past weekend, I started a new tradition: taking my kids camping for Father's Day. Since I wasn't sure of the best place to go, I asked Do you know of some good camping spots for kids in Colorado? I received some good responses, but waited until the "day of" to decide where we should go. Bad idea.

I decided on Peaceful Valley since they didn't seem to require reservations and it wasn't too far. The kids and I left town around 1:30 and arrived at the campground (North West of Boulder) around 3:00. It was packed and there were no spots available. After driving around for another hour, I realized I might end up on the FAIL Blog for being the Dad who couldn't find a camping spot and had to spend the night in a motel. I don't know if it's because I grew up in Montana and we never had to reserve campsites or if it's because there's a lot more people in Colorado than I realized. Regardless, I believe I learned my lesson when it comes to campsite reservations.

After stopping in Nederland and asking for good camping spots at a gas station, we proceeded to drive around for another hour trying to find the perfect site. Finally, at around 5:30, we found a site in the high mountains near the Eldora Ski Resort. It was along the road, had a river nearby and included a family/friends/kids troupe of 15 w/in 100 yards.

We settled in by setting up the tent, starting a campfire and beginning a search for bears (kids' idea). We never found any bears, but we had a lot of fun exploring. I knew my mission had succeeded when Abbie said to me, "Daddy, I love camping." As it got dark, we put the fire out and climbed into the tent and our sleeping bags. Being that there was still snow near our campsite, I was a little worried about the kids getting cold - especially since their sleeping bags are only rated to 35°F.

As we were getting ready for bed, my car suddenly roared to life. Yikes, WTF?! Then I remembered the remote start I had installed after Snow White got molested. I scrambled for my keys, found them under my knee and quickly turned off the car. After telling some stories, we all fell asleep 20 minutes later.

In the middle of the night, Jack woke up every 10 minutes for a couple hours. He'd crawl out of his sleeping bag and then claim to be cold. I'd talk him back into his bag where he'd warm up and fall asleep. Abbie slept all night and never woke up. At around midnight, my car again roared to life. Since my keys were hanging on the tent wall, I was quite surprised. I scrambled to find my keys in the dark and turned it off again. This happened every 3 hours throughout the night. I'm sure the neighbors loved it considering I have some fancy glasspack exhaust system that makes it pretty loud when it starts. I'd be interested to know if this "start every 3 hours" phenomenon happens every night. Maybe that's the reason my tank is always empty.

The good news is Snow White never woke the kids up, so they seemingly got a good night's sleep. There was frost on the ground when we woke up the next morning, so it did get cold. However, when the sun hit us at 8:45 in the morning, the temperature rose from 40°F to 60°F in a matter of minutes.

The next morning as I was packing things up and the kids were running around, Abbie came up to me. She asked, "Daddy, when can we go camping again? I had so much fun!" I told her she was in luck - our next camping trip is only a couple weeks away. My dad is flying in next weekend and we're doing the annual 4th of July trek to The Cabin. On the way up, we'll be camping in Yellowstone Park. I can't wait, but I should probably start working on that reservation.

Have you taken your kids camping this year?

LinkedIn's Engineering Blog

Have you been curious about LinkedIn's architecture or how they're using Grails and Rails? If so, you might be interested in LinkedIn's Engineering Blog. Over the past couple of weeks, a few Engineers have starting writing about our architecture, OpenSocial, RailsConf, YUI, Grails and OSGi. Below is a complete listing of Engineering posts.

• OSGi at LinkedIn: Java Compilation in OSGi
• Grails at LinkedIn
• OSGi at LinkedIn
• LinkedIn Speaks YUI
• Enlightenments from RailsConf 2008
• Google I/O and LinkedIn's Open Social Integration
• LinkedIn at JavaOne 2008

If there are topics you'd like to see us blog about, please let me know. I've somehow landed in the role of Editor for the Engineering Blog, so I should be able to hook you up if I can find an engineer to blog about what you're interested in.

On a related note, Rob Getzschman's entry LinkedIn discovers the truth about Cannes is quite entertaining. Highly recommended.

Do you know of some good camping spots for kids in Colorado?

This weekend, I'm taking the kids camping for the first time. It seems like a good Father's Day tradition and this seems like a good year to start it. I'm thinking of taking them to either Golden Gate Canyon State Park or Rocky Mountain National Park. The later is likely to be a lot colder at night, but it probably has more scenic camping spots too.

I'm looking for suggestions of good spots to camp w/in 2 hours of Denver. Got any?

Good times with kids in Colorado

A friend recently sent me an e-mail asking the following question:

May be coming to Colorado in early August for a good break. Can you share ideas on having good times with kids?

His kids are 3 and 5 years old, the same as Abbie and Jack. Here's my response:

[Read More]

RE: What's a good RIA to develop in 20 hours?

Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post and offered recommendations for RIAs to develop in 20 hours or less. In order to narrow down my choices, I've created a survey on SurveyMonkey.com. Here's a list of the application ideas I received from comments and e-mails:

1. Lightweight CMS
2. MP3 Player
3. Resume Editor/Publisher
4. Meal/Calorie Tracker
5. Contact Management
6. Planning Application
7. Timesheet Application
8. DB/SQL Client
9. Status Updater/Aggregator (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook)
10. Online File Explorer (browser-based FTP interface)

I like #3 (Resume) and #9 (Status) because I may be able to tie those into LinkedIn's RESTful API.

Click here to vote for the application you'd like me to develop »

Voting ends at noon on Friday (Mountain Time).

Update: My co-workers had a good suggestion at lunch today: pitchersacrossamerica.com. It seems it's kinda difficult to find bars that serve pitchers these days (at least in Denver). Create an app that allows people to enter in bars and restaurants that serve pitchers and show them on a map. Seems simple and fun. If enough people like the idea, I'll restart the survey with this as an option. In the meantime, the current (Wednesday night) numbers are here.

Update 2: Here's the results as of Thursday night. Only 15.5 more hours to vote!

Update 3: Final Results. Thanks to everyone who voted! I'm traveling a lot next week (Mountain View followed by Boston), but I'll try to write an entry on next steps.

RE: Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework?

The "Break it Down" Blog has a lengthy post on Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework? Or Maybe Not Java? Comparing Java Web Frameworks is hard because so many people are passionate about the framework they know best. Add a couple more like Flex and Ruby on Rails and its downright difficult. Nevertheless, this post is good in that it contains a lot of pretty trend graphs and it looks like the author has done some good research. It's likely the folks that will scream foul are the ones that did poor in the comparison (Tapestry and Stripes, I'm talking about you).

Surprising among the top Java Web Frameworks is the rise of Struts 2:

To quote:

Which is much more interesting I think is how Wicket adoption has stayed almost flat while Struts 2 adoption has spiked. Spring MVC/WebFlow seems to be going no where fast and racing JBoss Seam there.

The popularity of Struts 2 really caught me off guard with it being quite a bit different from Struts 1, I figured it got thrown into the "just another web framework" category, but I guess there is something in a name and it's doing quite well.

Regardless of what you think of the post and trends, you have to appreciate the amount of time the author put into it.

What's a good RIA to develop in 20 hours?

In less than two months, I'm making my annual trek to Portland, Oregon to speak at OSCON. To prepare for my talk, I'd like to develop the same application with two different combinations: Flex + Rails and GWT + Grails.

As luck would have it, I'm having a hard time coming up with a good application to write. I'd like to time-box it so I only spend 10 hours on the backend (for each) and 10 hours on the front-end, for a total of 40 hours for both applications.

Can you think of any good applications that would warrant a rich front-end and wouldn't take too long to create? I'd like to put both applications in production and generate enough traffic to be faced with scalability issues.

Over the next several weeks, I hope to start creating the applications and blog about what I've learned along the way. At some point, I hope to post an outline and a rough draft. With your help, I believe this can be an excellent presentation. If the presentation and applications are as good as I hope they'll be, it's likely I'll open source them for everyone to use.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Update: Thanks for all the great feedback. I've posted a survey to narrow the choices.

Riding to Red Rocks

A few years ago, Bruce and I rode our bikes from my house in Denver to Red Rocks to see a Big Head Todd concert. Little did we know it'd turn into an annual tradition.

That first ride was the most memorable. I used to live a few miles from Red Rocks, so I knew of a nice route (Platte River to Bear Creek) to get us there. That first trip out there took 2-3 hours and was pretty exhausting. On the way home, we left Red Rocks around 11pm and quickly realized we were ill-prepared.

We had no lights.

Since I knew the trail well, having ridden it many times, I didn't realize how dangerous it was. 15 minutes into the ride, I had to grab my brakes and come to a screeching halt so I didn't hit a big metal gate (goes across the road near the entrance of Bear Lake Park; 12" diameter metal tube about 3 1/2 feet off the ground). There was a couple making out on the back of a motorcycle a couple feet from me when it happened. Their reaction? "Whoa, that was close dude."

I rode around the gate and up a couple hundred yards until I reached a lit area. I sat there and waited for Bruce. All of a sudden, I heard a loud crash, followed by a 2nd one a few seconds later. I figured it couldn't be Bruce because there were two crashes. 30 seconds later, here comes Bruce, cussing up a storm and looking like he was in pretty bad shape. I couldn't help but laugh as I thought of the expressions on the faces of the couple on the motorcycle. Bruce turned out to be OK, but we both were pretty skittish as we navigated the way home in the pitch black. We've purchased bike lights since that trip and use them every year.

I'm not a huge fan of BHTM, but I am a fan of their concerts. It's especially cool for me because I went to college with the keyboardist, Jeremy Lawton (guy on the left above). We were fraternity brothers and enjoyed many frosty beverages together back in the day. We don't keep in touch now, but it's still fun to see him and how much success he's had in his career.

Should be an awfully fun night tonight.