Raible Designs

Timelines in OmniGraffle

Earlier this week, I needed to create timeline graphics for my What's new in AppFuse 2.0 presentation. I found a Timeline script for OmniGraffle and was able to create some pretty nifty images with it. Below are the two timelines I created, one for the History of AppFuse and one for The Future.

I'll be delivering this presentation at our seminar later this afternoon. With free knowledge and a complementary happy hour afterwards, why would you miss it?

It looks like Denver weather will make it interesting for attendees to get downtown. Hopefully most folks will take the light rail in. That's my plan.

Spring's "p" namespace and AppFuse Performance Tuning

After seeing Rod Johnson's post about Spring 2.0's "p" namespace, I'm wondering if it's something we should include in AppFuse? I don't think it's quite as intuitive as <property name="">, but I'm curious to see what users think. The biggest reason against using it is (AFAIK) neither Eclipse nor IDEA will give you code-completion on (whereas they will for <property name="">).

In other news, Matt Fleming has an excellent writeup on how he optimized AppFuse (Spring MVC flavor) to handle pages with large forms. His form was 38 MB worth of HTML when saved to disk so I doubt everyone will need this, but it certainly is interesting information. If there's enough demand, we'll make Matt's suggestions available options in an upcoming release.

Back in Denver

Raible Road Trip #11 was an excellent vacation. Our plan to drive through the night worked out splendidly. Not only did I make it to 7:30 a.m. (with the help of a bit of Red Bull), but I got to jam to my favorite tunes all night long. We left at 11 p.m. and I handed over the reigns to Julie just outside of Billings. She drove for the next 3 hours, and I took over again for the final 3. Total time: 14 hours.

We arrived at the cabin at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday. Actually, I should say we got stuck at the cabin at 1:00 because we made it all the way up the "bumpy road", but didn't make the last hill. 40 minutes later and at 40 miles an hour, I made it up the last hill. The next 3 days at the cabin were great. We took Cookie the Dog and she loved it as much as the kids did. The drive home over the last 2 days wasn't nearly as pleasant as the drive there, but listening to "Little Einstein's" on the DVD player is never as much fun as listening to your favorite tunes.

Click on the images below to view pictures from The Cabin.

The next couple weeks will likely be hectic. This week I'll be writing AppFuse 2.0 documentation. Next week I'll be delivering a Spring + Hibernate class in Boise, Idaho with Country Bry and Scott from Virtuas. Then I'll be flying to The Spring Experience on Thursday for a weekend in paradise. Better yet, I'll be spending the following week in Florida on vacation.

Free Seminar: Lightweight Java for 2007

If you happen to live near Denver, you won't want to miss our Lightweight Java For 2007 Seminar this week. It starts this Wednesday at 1:00 PM. We'll be doing talks on JPA, Spring 2.0, JSF + Ajax and AppFuse 2.0. The seminar is free and should be a good opportunity to learn about what's hot in Java these days.

All attendees will receive a complementary copy of a book on Java Technologies, seminar materials, and will be entered into a raffle for an iPod and other great prizes! Directly following the event, join the Virtuas gang for complimentary drinks and hors d'oeuvres at Rock Bottom Brewery from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

Raible Road Trip #11

Sometime before midnight tonight, we'll be departing on Raible Road Trip #11. This time we're going to The Cabin for Thanksgiving. Of course, we'd prefer to fly, but neither ticket prices nor arrival times are cooperating, so we're doing the road trip.

It's a 15 hour drive, which is pretty brutal for the kids. In an attempt to alleviate their pain, and get there in one fell swoop, we're going to try something new. We're going to leave at night (as soon as Julie's done with her Barenaked Ladies concert) and drive straight through. I'm in the midst of conditioning myself for the drive. What does that mean? It means I slept in yesterday, took a nap in the afternoon, and then stayed up all night. The good news is I got quite a bit of work done. The bad news is I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped.

As I write this, it's almost fully light out. I should probably hit the sack and get plenty of rest for tonight. The Cabin doesn't have internet access nor cell phone service, so I'll be completely out of touch for a week. Should be nice.

AppFuse developerWorks articles in Chinese

Thanks to Technorati, I found that Chinese articles on AppFuse happen to be some of the most popular on IBM developerWorks. Not only has 7 Simple Reasons been translated, but another article titled ?? AppFuse ???? J2EE ?? ("AppFuse quickly built using J2EE Application" according to Google) was written just last month. It's great having non-English speakers using AppFuse - it insures we have excellent internationalization support!

Update: I'm aware the Chinese characters didn't come through on this post. I'm working on getting the MySQL database powering this site to support UTF-8.

How can Nabble be improved?

I recently received the following e-mail from the founders of Nabble:

You are the first person (literally) to recognize the value of Nabble. So far, Nabble has been well received. But it needs more users. There are a lot of open source projects archived on Nabble, but how do we go about letting people know about us? We would like project owners to link to us and skin us like you did with appfuse, but I am not sure how to do it. You know many people in the open source world, so we would really like to hear your thoughts and advice.

For example, should I go and announce Nabble on a project list? If so, should I do it on the dev list or user list? Is this considered OK or spam? Or should I contact the mailing list owner by private email? What nabble feature do you consider most useful to the project owners?

My response to the first paragraph:

I would suggest e-mailing project owners and pointing out projects like AppFuse and Maven that've taken the time to "skin" their forums. I'm guessing you could get some real good traction at Apache because they like to keep everything on mailing lists. People like your forums because they can post (and subscribe to) a single message. AFAIK, you can't do this with any other mailing list archive. Maybe you could write an article for TSS or InfoQ that tells all the features and highlights projects that are using it.

As far as announcing Nabble on a project list, I said:

I would do it on the dev list, but sending private e-mail is probably OK as well. I don't think it will be perceived as spam. Sending it to the dev list might skip a step for the project founder. You could also offer to "skin" forums for folks - so it looks like their project sites. I think the most useful feature for end-users is search and easy browsing. It's *much* better than the archiving/browsing tool that Apache uses.

One thing that might attract for folks is vanity URLs. I don't know if it's possible, but something as simple as appfuse.nabble.com might be attractive to some people, or having some sort of path-based URL, for example archive.nabble.com/java/java.net/appfuse. That way it'd be easier for folks to "guess" the URLs of mailing list archives.

What's your advice? What should Nabble do to get more users? Maybe if folks new about Nabble's RSS feeds, they'd use it more. I'm currently subscribed to Maven, Wicket, Shale and Stripes, just to name a few.

AppFuse at the Denver JBoss User Group

Last night, I presented "Seven Simple Reasons to use AppFuse" at the Denver JBoss User Group. I was definitely surprised to present this talk to a packed room of developers. One person joked afterwards that there might've been a lot of Microsoft folks there, all fearing that Vista was going to doom their future. It was at a Microsoft building, so I guess it's possible. This presentation is similar to my developerWorks article with the same title.

Download Seven Simple Reasons to use AppFuse (PDF, 6.3 MB)

If you're interested in learning more about Lightweight Java technologies, Virtuas is hosting a free seminar later this month. After the seminar, we'll be sponsoring a happy hour at the Rock Bottom Brewery.

Boys Weekend

Julie and Abbie left on a jet plane this morning to spend the weekend in South Carolina. Abbie's best friend, Annabelle, moved there in May of this year. Julie thought it'd be fun to get them together again, as well as attend a Doodlebops concert. So the girls are off, and it's me and the boy for the weekend. We plan on having a great time.

First off, the new Light Rail opens today and Jack loves trains. So we're going to hit the grand opening in about an hour, and then he's going to join me in "going to work". I don't know how long he'll last in the office, but I'm sure he'll have fun regardless. Tomorrow, there's a DU hockey game, as well as free passes on the Light Rail all day. Should be a fun weekend, especially with all of the good football on tap. Now it's time to head out for some pancakes and eggs, I'm not much of a cook when Mommy's out of town.

How do you get open source frameworks past the red tape?

From an e-mail I received earlier this month, with a subject of "Acceptance red tape":

After requesting permission to use the Spring Framework for the business logic and data access layers of an application, how do you fight something like this? Spring is not an approved Framework for the ********** environment. We understand the benefits of the framework. However, we have not certified it in our environment. Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community. We would like to reduce the number of frameworks used in our environment, and do not want to be left with "legacy" frameworks that have little acceptance or support as is the case with the pico container. This is a response from one of our clients after asking about the use of a framework in our development after another vendor had used the PicoContainer without their permission. We have Spring experience and we love it. My responses have been to ask what they have certified that we could use and to ask their business staff to override their tech staff. I'm caught needing to redesign an aging J2EE application with an awfully over-architected original design confined to EJB 2.1, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4, and JDK 1.4.X in a very short amount of time. The additional responses were that they have only certified Struts and although both the business staff and the tech staff admit they know the benefits of Spring, neither of them are allowing us to use it.

My response:

Wow - I don't know what to say, especially when they say "Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community." They're probably using Struts and they thinks it's wonderful, eh?

I could compose a long response with lots of details, but the fact that they prefer EJB over Spring is baffling. Spring is so much easier to program with, it's not even funny. Granted, EJB does have its place, but it's often used as a hammer for a problem that doesn't exist.

Have you experienced similar "Acceptance red tape" in your company? If so, how did you work around or work through it?