Raible Designs

Blizzard of 2006 - Wednesday Afternoon

It's coming down pretty good now. There's 8-12 inches of snow on the ground, with varying degrees of depth because it's so windy. I just walked down to our local Sushi place and the snow was up to the top of my Sorel boots. While I was waiting for my order, I noticed the snow is actually coming down sideways thanks to the wind. On the way back, I learned it's pretty fricken' nasty - walking into the storm gives you a whole new perspective.

From the looks of it, this town will be snowed in tomorrow. The airport is pretty much shutdown already. If you were planning on flying out of Denver for Christmas, you're not going now. The flights are already booked for Christmas, so there will be no extra room for those with cancelled flights today.

Here comes Winter!

Tomorrow should be an interesting day. The news says 12"-16" in the Denver metro area. Here's the forecast:

... there will be a couple of inches of snow by Wednesday morning and the storm should intensify throughout the day. There could be 10 or more inches of snow in the metro area by Wednesday evening.

I love the fact that it's going to be a very White Christmas. I wonder if this one will rival the Blizzard of 2003?

Speaking of local news, NBA basketball in Denver just got really interesting. The NBA's two top scorers on the same team? The Answer is Here. The first game that Iverson and Melo play in is on January 20th - it figures that I'd have tickets for the LaBron game on the 19th.

Update on Wednesday morning: The blizzard begins. It looks like they've upped the ante on snow levels too:

The metro area is expecting 14 to 24 inches of snow by Thursday morning.

Ironically, my sister happens to be flying through Denver today. Airlines are canceling flights, so we may get to visit with her for a day or two.

The kids love it, they couldn't wait to play in the snow this morning. So far, there's about 2-3 inches on our deck. Here's the view from my office:

Bamboo

After reading Tim's post about Bamboo yesterday, I downloaded and tried it out. I'm very impressed, as I usually am with Atlassian products. As a first impression, I think it's better than all the open source products, but not quite as good as Pulse. Bamboo has a nice UI, but Pulse has a lot more Ajax goodies that make it more usable (IMHO of course).

P.S. I think it's ironic that both Pulse and Bamboo build AppFuse 2.0 (Maven 2-based) just fine, but Continuum hasn't had a successful build yet.

SiteMesh 2.3?

Did you know the SiteMesh folks released version 2.3 back in October? Here's proof. Unfortunately, there's no release notes and the release hasn't been uploaded to Maven's repository. There are release notes in JIRA, but not all of them seemed to be fixed. What's up with that? Did you guys forget how to manage a project?

Back in Denver

After living out of a suitcase for most of December, it was nice to arrive back in Denver last night. I left here on December 3rd to travel to Boise, Idaho to teach a Spring course. From there, I flew to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to attend The Spring Experience. This was an excellent show, and I blogged most of the sessions I attended. To read about my AppFuse talk on Saturday night, see my Spring Live blog.

After TSE, I spent the next week with my family in Florida. We drove up to Disney World on the 2nd day of our vacation and had a blast. No one was there, so lines where short and the kids couldn't stop smiling.

While watching the kids' faces light up at Disney was cool, driving Julie's Mom's Cayenne Turbo S around all week was a highlight for me. It was definitely a gas-guzzler, but 520 horses is an awful lot of fun. It rained a lot the remainder of the week - almost 8 inches in 12 hours one day. Even when raining, the temperature still hovered around 80°F all week long. As crazy as it sounds, I'm actually happy to get back to the cool weather in Denver (high of 30°F today).

I'll be in the office all week, trying to tie up some loose ends before the end of the year. This weekend, it's back to vacation mode for another week. This time we'll be heading up to Steamboat for skiing, holiday cheer and (hopefully) lots of snow.

[TSE] Hop into Real Object Oriented (ROO) with Ben Alex

This session's goals are to:

• To detail the "ROO" DDD architecture
• To show you how productive ROO can be
• To profile an Australian project using ROO

ROO is more of an implementation than an architecture. So what is ROO? It's not an Australian marsupial or an Australian airline. It's a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) implementation.

Real Object Oriented (ROO) is both an architectural approach and a framework with code generation.[Read More]

[TSE] Building Modern Web Applications with Mike Stenhouse

Mike Stenhouse is the creator of the CSS Framework we use in AppFuse. Mike is going to talk about the tools he uses to develop web applications. Mike works solely on the front-end, no backend work.

"In 2007 we’ll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today’s desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs." -- Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Web Standards is a methodology and philosophy, not just valid CSS and XHTML. The main philosophy behind web standards is progressive enhancement. The methodology behind web standards is a 3-step process.[Read More]

[TSE] Keynote: The Bigger Picture with Adrian Colyer

We've seen a lot of things over the last few days, but what about the big picture? It's not just about the Spring Framework anymore, but there's also a lot of sub-projects: SFW, SWF, SWS, S-OSGi. Then there's Enterprise services: clustering, persistence, messaging and scheduling. Industry trends: SOA, Web 2.0/RIA, RAD stacks.

Agenda

• Spring portfolio: unifying themes, fitting the pieces together (by layer) and future direction
• Facing the feature: my boss says I need a SOA, from auto-suggest to RIA and the quest for ever-increasing productivity

[Read More]

[TSE] Spring-OSGI with Adrian Colyer

One of the first questions people ask about OSGi is "what the heck is it?"

Most people don't even know what it is. OSGi stands for Open Services Gateway initiative. From the very beginning, it was designed to be lightweight and dynamic. This is the major difference between it and other containers. It's always been designed to have things added and removed. Now it's tagline is: "The Dynamic Module System for Java".

It's designed to allow you to partition a system into a number of modules (a.k.a. bundles). There's strict visibility rules (similar to protected and private). There's a resolution process (dependencies are satisfied) and it understands versioning.

It's dynamic! Modules can be installed, started, stopped, uninstalled and updated - all at runtime.[Read More]

[TSE] The Holy Grails of Web Frameworks with Guillaume LaForge

Under the hood, Grails uses Spring MVC. It has support for "flash scope" between requests.

I find it funny that flash scope is so popular these days, we've had this in AppFuse for four years. However, web frameworks didn't add native support for it until it had a name (provided by Rails). To be fair to Struts Classic, they had support for it before Rails was even invented.

Rather than JSPs, Grails uses Grails Server Pages, which look much like JSPs. Grails uses SiteMesh by default and allows you to easily change the layout used with a meta tag.

<meta name="layout" content="main"/>

Most of the dynamic attributes in a GSP are rendered using the various "g" tags. There's dynamic taglibs for logic (if, else, elseif), iterating, linking, ajax (remoteFunction, remoteLink, formRemote, submitToRemote), form (select, currencySelect, localeSelect, datePicker, checkBox), rendering (render*, layout*, paginate), validation (eachError, hasError, message) and UI (i.e. richtexteditor). [Read More]