Raible Designs

New Bike - Gary Fisher HiFi Plus

It's been a little over 2 years since my mountain bike got stolen. I bought a new bike a few weeks later, but it's a commuter, not a mountain bike. Today, I finally bought myself a new mountain bike and took it straight to 3 Sisters for a nice ride. My last bike was a Gary Fisher Sugar 3, and this one is a Gary Fisher HiFi Plus. It's awesome to ride and I can't wait to take it some more of the front range trails. Denver has some incredible trails in the foothills. They're not easy, but they sure are fun. This week, I hope to ride Apex, Deer Creek Canyon and White Ranch.

The Perfect Summer Vacation?

OSCON is July 23-27. The Oregon Brewers Festival is July 26-29. If you combine those two with a night at McMenamins Kennedy School, it sounds like the perfect summer vacation to me.

Wicket Graduates

From the Wicket user mailing list:

We have Graduation! Apache Wicket is established as a top level project within the Apache Software Foundation.

Congratulations to the most enthusiastic and passionate web framework development team in Javaland!

Webinar on Wednesday: Introduction to Apache Roller

If you're not doing anything this Wednesday, you might want to checkout my Introduction to Apache Roller Webinar. It's sponsored by Covalent and has the following agenda:

11:00: Introductions
11:05: What is Apache Roller 
11:10: Installing Roller
11:20: Roller Architecture
   - 11:25: Blog Customization
   - 11:35: Server Customization
11:40: Other Features: Using Weblog Clients and Planet
11:50: Q & A

Heck, even if you are doing something, you should still check it out - especially if you're planning on installing Roller for yourself or for your company. Here's the details and how to signup:

To register, click here and follow the provided steps.

About Covalent and Roller
Covalent recently announced it is offering full commercial support for Apache Roller, the open source blog server from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Apache Roller drives the Covalent blog, Sun Microsystem's blogs.sun.com blogging site, IBM DeveloperWorks blogs, the Javalobby's 10,000 user strong JRoller Java community site, and hundreds of other blogs world-wide. Roller is a Java Web application that is run on any Java EE server and any relational database.

<Sidenote/>
I think it's important to point out that JRoller and Roller are not the same thing. JRoller is a service provided by JavaLobby that provides free blogs, whereas Roller is the software that powers it. There's been a lot of negative press about JRoller in recent months and from talking to folks, it sounds like most of it is well-deserved. The service is down a fair amount and when it's up, it's extremely slow.

The good news is these problems should go away in the near future. From Matthew Schmidt in a recent JavaLobby Newsletter:

DZone Network Server Upgrades Coming
Over the weekend, Rick and I started the long and painful process of finally upgrading our three-year-old servers to some hardware that should let us scale and meet the needs of the network for the foreseeable future. With these new servers, comes some upgrades that many of you have been trying to beat into my head for months now, including an upgrade to a recent a version of Roller (powers JRoller) as I can find, and an upgrade to the latest and greatest Codebeamer (powers JavaForge). In addition, there's also going to be a much-needed make over to Javalobby and EclipseZone. Of course, these changes won't happen immediately and we'll be migrating to the new hardware first, but keep your eyes open for some nice updates to nearly all our communities. These upgrades have already started and we'd appreciate any feedback you have on whether things like Javalobby and EclipseZone are working properly. Drop me a line if you notice anything not working properly or feeling slow.

IMO, JavaLobby has been mostly mute about its stance on JRoller, and I've heard from folks there's virtually no support. My guess is this is because they've been concentrating on DZone so much. Maybe they need some volunteers to make JRoller more robust? Or maybe it should be moved to other servers that can make money off the service and re-invest it (like wordpress.com)? Hopefully nothing has to change and JRoller can become a higher priority for JavaLobby in the near future.

Update: The webinar went quite well - thanks to everyone who attended! You can download the PowerPoint (or PDF) and audio from Covalent's Webinars. Also, I mentioned a couple of Dave's presentations in my talk. You can download those by clicking on the links below:

• Roller: An Open Source Java EE Blogging Platform
• Roller and blogs as a web development platform

Summer Gigs

I'm happy to report that after posting The good ol' Job Hunt last week, I had a prosperous week searching for my next gig. I got an offer from a local company in Denver on Tuesday and had 5 interviews on Thursday with various companies. I ended up accepting an offer from LinkedIn for a 3-month contract that starts in a few weeks (thanks for the hookup Brian!).

I also landed a 2-week contract that'll keep me occupied through the end of June. There's a nice week between the two gigs where we're heading to The Cabin for the 4th. I'm currently working on getting an "anchor desk" at the Hive Coorperative, but unfortunately won't be able to use it much in July. I'll be in Mountain View the first couple weeks, followed by Portland (for OSCON) at the end of the month.

Anyone out there interested in a tech meetup in Mountain View in July? My birthday is the 16th - maybe we could meet up around then?

Update: My first day at LinkedIn rocked.

The good ol' Job Hunt

My Boston gig ended last week and I'm currently enjoying a week off with the kids at my parents' place in Oregon. While I have a few opportunities, I can't help but think there's got to be a better system for connecting developers to contracts. While I'm open to full-time work, I've found that contracts suite me better because of all the conferences I attend and time I take off.

In Denver, there's quite a few gigs available, but they all seem to have the same two problems: 1) no rate is published and 2) you have to go through a recruiter to get them. Recruiters aren't bad people, and I don't mind dealing with them. However, they do tend to take 20% off the top. Most of the recruiters I've worked with in the past are responsible for one thing - the initial introduction. After that, they tend to disappear and you never see them again. However, you're constantly reminded they're there when you realize they're taking 20% of your wages. With a recruiter involved, the rates in Denver are OK, but lower than expected. Without a recruiter, the rates are pretty good.

The best solution I've found to the getting rid of the recruiter-middle-man problem is this blog and networking. When someone contacts me directly for a contract, it's usually easier to negotiate a rate that makes both parties happy. However, most of these contacts come from out of state, so then there's the travel and working-from-home problems. I think I can solve the work-from-home problem by joining something like the Hive Cooperative. As for traveling, I'd rather work in Denver but I'm willing to travel to select cities: namely Boston, NYC and Portland (Oregon). Why those cities? Because I have friends and/or family that live there.

As I'm out here in Oregon this week, I've realized that working in Portland would likely be the most enjoyable for me to travel to. My parents live close by, it's a kick-ass city and it's especially enjoyable during the summer. However, I'm faced with the same problem: how do I connect with folks looking for good help without going through recruiters? According to Dice.com, Portland has a lot of interesting gigs, but they're (once again), all listed by recruiting companies. Does anyone know of a service that connects employers directly with consultants? Or, even better, is anyone out there in Denver or Portland that's looking to hire someone with my skills?

Bus Project Update

Not much has changed on my bus since the last time I visited it in the shop. However, this time it is out of the corner and the guy (Mike Lopez of Twins Auto Body) is actively working on it. He's in the midst of replacing the floor pan and doing all of the welding it needs before prepping for paint. I doubt it'll be done this summer, but I'm still hopeful. We snapped a few pics to record its progress.

JAR Hell with XFire 1.2.6

I discovered something somewhat disturbing last week. As part of AppFuse 2.0 M5, we added "xfire-all" as a dependency so web services could be supported out-of-the-box. What I didn't know is that xfire-all has transitive dependencies to 40 other libraries, which total 13.4 MB in size. Yikes!

Does XFire take the cake for the most bloated library you can use or are we just including too much (xfire-all vs. fine-grained dependencies)? I tried changing to the recommended Maven configuration and there's still 28 JARs added by XFire.

The WEB-INF/lib directory of a basic Struts 2 + Spring + Hibernate AppFuse application is already 19.2 MB to start. Adding XFire for web services increases the size to 29.2 MB. While disk space may be cheap, some users have noticed "mvn jetty:run" is much slower with XFire (presumably from the JAR processing that happens at startup). Is there an uber XFire JAR we can use instead?

Why hasn't JBoss "bought" Facelets?

Remember when JBoss use to "buy" open source projects by hiring their lead developers and paying them to work on open source? Remember when Marc Fleury said something about owning open source projects?

Have things changed at Red Hat? When are they going to buy Facelets? From the Facelets mailing list:

JBoss Seam progress is heavily dependent on facelets so might be JBoss could to something to remedy the situation with lack of evolution in current facelets.

Facelets is a very good project which now suffers due to lack of evolution which it needs.

Please, keep it going...

Jacob - are you willing to be bought? According to the Facelets user community, this project could really use some help.

Canoo WebTest vs. Selenium

From a message I sent earlier to the AppFuse user mailing list:

After getting Dojo's DropdownDatePicker working with both Struts and Spring MVC, I've run into a snag:

You can no longer use Canoo WebTest to enter dates in a form.

It doesn't find the form element because HtmlUnit (the underlying browser implementation for Canoo) doesn't understand/render Dojo's components.

For users, workarounds include:

1. Don't write tests for entering data on forms that have required dates.
2. Don't make dates required.

Either way, it seems logical to move to Selenium for UI testing.

What do you think? Are Dojo-based components the future of Ajax support in Java web frameworks? If so, I wish Dojo allowed more "progressive enhancement" features instead of the invalid HTML feature it seems to rely on now. I'm more than willing to support Dojo if that's what AppFuse users want. However, in my experience with Struts 2's datetimepicker, it seems pretty slow. Of course, if I could render my own input element and then add a datepicker next to it, I'd be much happier. AFAICT, the Struts' datetimepicker doesn't allow you to do this, but I could be wrong.

Of course, if Dojo 0.9 lives up to the hype and is much faster - maybe I should quit caring about Hijax and just start writing those Selenium tests?

For users of those "next-gen" Java frameworks (like Seam, Grails and Wicket), what do you use for UI testing? Does Canoo WebTest work for you when you have a lot of Ajax functionality? If not, do you use Selenium or leave UI testing up to the QA folks?

Update: I ended up using jscalendar for both Spring MVC and Struts 2's datepickers. It's simply the best tool for the job. Dojo is too bloated IMO (240K for a datepicker!) for such a small feature. This allows us to worry about getting AppFuse 2.0 out the door without migrating to Selenium first. We will eventually migrate to Selenium (it's a better tool for the job IMO), but probably not until 2.1. The only question is what's the best way to distribute Selenium tests?