Raible Designs

It's getting cold around here

This week, I started riding my bike to work again. It figures that it just happens to be one of the coldest weeks in quite some time. This morning, when I was riding home, the thermometer read 27°F on the 7News sign. It's really not too bad once you start riding, but it is tough to get going in the morning. It's one of those things - if you dress for it, you're more than comfortable.

I've ridden my bike to work so much in the last year that I had to buy a new chain and rear cassette yesterday. My chain was so stretched that it was skipping, no matter what gear I was in. Of course, after spending a bunch of money getting everything fixed yesterday - I got a flat tire on my way to work this morning. It was the first flat I've gotten since I started working downtown a year and a half ago. I wasn't too far away though - it only took me a 1/2 hour to finish the commute on foot. I fixed the tire with slime this afternoon, so hopefully it'll be another year and a half before my next flat.

GenericRCP - A GUI for your Hibernate Domain Objects

Peter Schneider-Manzell is an active contributor to AppFuse's documentation and mailing list. Yesterday, he posted a message to the mailing list announcing the 0.3.0 release of GenericRCP.

We (a good friend of mine and myself) started a SpringRichclient based project, called "GenericRCP". With this tool, you can edit your DB directly via your classes and Hibernate. The GUI (Panels / Binding etc...) is generated dynamically out of a JAR, containing the classes and hbm.xml files.

For AppFusers: You only need to import your <.....>-dao.jar, and you can start to edit the values.

You can use this project as a starting point for a customized editor with CRUD functionality and add customized panels / attribute editors for different classes / attribute types, and combinations of them.

Yesterday, I tried GenericRCP with the appfuse-dao.jar from 1.9.4 (XDoclet-based), as well as the appfuse-data-common-2.0-SNAPSHOT.jar (annotations-based) and it worked with both. Nice work Peter!

Export your Facelets pages into PDF, PNG and SVG

Jacobus Steenkamp has an interesting article on java.net: Combine JSF Facelets and the Flying Saucer XHTML Renderer. In this article, Jacobus shows how you can use a filter and the Flying Saucer project to export a Facelets page to PDF, PNG or SVG. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. I don't know if I'll ever have a need for it, but it's nice to know that this functionality exists.

Shameless plug: Equinox 1.7 and AppFuse 1.9.4 both include Facelets for their JSF options.

greendimes - powered by AppFuse

greendimes is a company that helps you to stop receiving junk mail. From their web site:

There are dozens of companies that sell your name to make a buck (actually, lots of bucks). We'll make sure you're taken off their mailing lists. How?

Well, we'll call, email and write these companies to make sure they leave you alone! This isn't easy. These companies change their policies and their contact info often. And even if you do go through the effort of validating every company's policies and contact info and write to each one, you could still get junk mail from them. Why?

Because when you move, donate money to charity, buy something from a catalog or do one of a hundred other seemingly innocent things, your name gets sold! That's why we're a recurring service -- we're going to contact these companies on your behalf a LOT, just to make sure you're kept off of these lists and people stop selling your name and address.

We keep you off.
Just because you're off doesn't mean you stay off. Just about anything you do -- refinance, move, get a new credit card, etc. -- puts you back on. So, we will regularly request your information be removed from existing lists and we add new junk mailers to our list regularly.

Sounds like a pretty cool service to me.

How do I know it's powered by AppFuse? Because they're still using the AppFuse favicon, and because I recently saw they're hiring a Senior Software Engineer with AppFuse experience listed as a bonus.

[CSS 2006] Mike Milinkovich's Keynote

I'm sitting in Mike Milinkovich's Keynote at the Colorado Software Summit in Keystone, Colorado. Mike is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - his picture can be seen on his IT Conversations page. Mike had fun getting up here - driving through the snow - and waiting on the freeway for a couple hours while the "rock slide" was cleared.

Mike's presentation is titled "All About Platforms, Lessons learned from Eclipse". Mike used to work for Oracle, and he's been at the Eclipse Foundation for 2 years. Before that, he was at WebGain. The company that "would not believe that Visual Cafe sucked". He's been in the Tools Business for a long time, and has never bothered to learn Java. He used to do a lot in SmallTalk and that's they last time he programmed. The "repository thingy" in Visual Age for Java was his fault.[Read More]

OpenLogic sponsors AppFuse Development

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about integrating Facelets and Ajax4JSF with MyFaces. What I didn't mention was I needed to do this for a project I was working on at OpenLogic in Broomfield. Even better, OpenLogic gave me permission to use the code in AppFuse 1.9.4. In addition, I learned enough on the project to integrate Facelets and Ajax4JSF into Equinox 1.7.

Please help me in thanking OpenLogic for their generosity! Also, don't forget to checkout the OpenLogic Blogs.

The New MacBook Pros - 40% faster!

My MacBook Pro is fast, but there's no such thing as a computer that's too fast. The fact that the new one is 40% faster than my current one makes me drool. Anyone interested in buying a 15" MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM?

[CSS 2006] Snow in Keystone

Looks like a good day for skiing...

From the archives: How do you become an independent consultant and get contracts?

From Wednesday, January 05, 2005: How do you become an independent consultant and get contracts?

[CSS 2006] Day 3

This morning, I gave both my talks back-to-back and was done by noon. After lunch, I attended Scott Blum's Taming AJAX with GWT. It was a good talk with some impressive demos. I definitely need to dig into GWT more - it looks like very cool technology. I can't help but think it's the "widget framework" that JSF was supposed to be.

I was planning on heading back to Denver tonight, but it started snowing and Julie said they expect 10" in East Denver. Who knows if it'll actually snow that much (the weatherfolks are often wrong), but I don't want to be on the roads.[Read More]