Raible Designs

[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]

[CSS 2006] To ESB or not to ESB?

Do you have to have an ESB to have a SOA?

I'm sitting in Denise Hatzidakis's talk titled "To ESB or not to ESB" as requested by Mick Huisking. Dinese is the Chief Technologist at Perficient, Inc.. It's interesting, on her opening slide she has a @perficient.com e-mail address, as well as an @us.ibm.com address.

"SOA stands for Same Old Architecture"

This talk focuses on using an ESB and how to build it. There's a lot of ESB products out there. An ESB is not about a product - it's about what kind of connectivity you need between your systems.[Read More]

[CSS 2006] Using Maven 2 to get control over your Development Process

This afternoon I attended Hermod Opstvedt's talk on Using Maven 2 to get control over your Development Process. Most of it was review for me, but I took some notes anyway. About halfway through, I quit taking notes and just listened. The most interesting part for me was seeing how the Maven Embedder works. Since Maven doesn't currently allow you to create archetypes from existing projects the embedder seems like a good workaround. I'd rather code in Java rather than XML any day. [Read More]

[CSS 2006] Day 1

Today, I woke up early and made it to the conference in time for breakfast and John Soyring's Keynote. While I didn't stay tuned in the whole time, it looked like he had some good slides and he was definitely an eloquent speaker. It did turn into an IBM sales pitch at times, but overall it was pretty good. One thing I didn't know is apparently Wayne Kovsky (the conference organizer) , used to have John's job at IBM. John "provides global business leadership for a multi-billion dollar annual revenue portion of the IBM software business" - so apparently he's doing pretty well.

After Soyring's talk, I attended Bill Dudney's Introducing Cayenne presentation. I didn't listen as good I should have (notice the timestamp on the AppFuse 1.9.4 Release), but I did learn that the Demo Gods were having a case of the Mondays. After lunch, my Seven Simple Reasons to use AppFuse talk started at 1:00. It was the first time I'd presented the talk, so I didn't know how long it'd go. The first demo worked, the second one bombed. I shoulda typed @spring.validator type="required" instead of @spring.validator required="true". Oh well.

This afternoon, I went to Mike Bowler's Ruby for Java Programmers talk. I was a bit late, but it was an excellent presentation. I'd recommend it to anyone. That raps up Day 1, tomorrow I hope to hit Event Driven Architecture with Apache ActiveMQ and POJOs and To ESB or Not to ESB.

AppFuse 1.9.4 Released

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, and Facelets + Ajax4JSF integration for the JSF option. In addition, many libraries have been fixed and a few bugs have been squashed.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• 7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US