The past week has been great. Not only did I stay off the computer for most of the week, but I had a ton of fun with my Mom, Dad, sister, Julie and the kids. My parents flew in last Tuesday, and that marked the beginning of my Christmas Break. On Wednesday and Thursday, my dad and I pulled the engine on the Bus. Ironically, the first day we couldn't figure out how to get it out, but w/in 5 minutes of consulting How To Keep your Volkswagen Alive, we had the solution. The bus is a bit different from a bug - there's only 3 bolts (instead of 4) and one of them is on the inside of the engine compartment. Daddy's Bus should be ready for the shop sometime in January.
The weekend was awesome - complete with mimosas on Christmas morning while unwrapping presents. Abbie and Jack are at a terribly cute age - and it was a blast to see their eyes light up when opening presents. It was tough to get them to open the next present b/c they were so enthralled with the one they just opened. After all was said and done, Abbie is now riding a "big girl" bike and we have a trampoline in our back yard. That should work out nicely when we get our first surprise snow storm. 
Fortunately, the weather has been gorgeous (almost 70!) for the past week.
Yesterday was an epic powder-day at Copper Mountain. My sister and I headed up in the morning and skied (she snowboarded) all day in 10" of fresh powder. We're heading up again this weekend for the New Year (Breckenridge this time) and it's supposed to snow in the hills for the next 3 days. Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaa hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaawwww!! Two days at my client this week and then back up to the wonderful pow-pow. Next week, the contract with my client finishes up and I get to return to our office in downtown Denver. I'm pumped because that means I get to start riding my bike to work again. I took it in for a tuneup today and should get it back in a couple days.
2006 is going to be a good year. I get about 2-3 e-mails a week about mentoring and consulting and it looks like I'll be quite busy. I hope to squeeze in some time for Spring Live and AppFuse in January and hope to have AppFuse 1.9 released in the next few weeks. My Dad's 60th birthday is in mid-January, so my family is heading to Cancun for a week. Should be a good time for sure. 
This release's major new feature is dependency downloading using Maven 2's Ant tasks. The main reason I used Maven 2 over Ivy is
because I've heard rumors that Ant 1.7 will include dependency downloading - and they're planning on integrating the work that
Maven has already done.
One of the nice things about using Maven 2's Ant Tasks, is you
can download Maven 2 and generate your Eclipse or IDEA (possibly even Netbeans)
project files using "mvn eclipse:eclipse" or "mvn idea:idea". You can also use Maven 2 to build and test things if you like.
The only thing that doesn't currently when using Maven to test Equinox is the web tests with Cargo. I can try to get those working
if there's enough demand. For now, you'll have to use Ant if you want to test the UI.
All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as its build/test system is
explained in Spring Live. A summary
of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):
- Removed packaged JARs in favor of Maven 2's Ant Tasks. Dependencies are now
downloaded on-demand, greatly reducing the size of Equinox-based applications.
- By specifying compile, test and runtime dependencies in a pom.xml file,
Equinox applications can now be built with Maven 2. The only difference
between building with Maven 2 and Ant (at this time) is that the M2 build
does not support testing with Cargo. However, there is an M2 Cargo plugin
so this shouldn't be hard to fix if you have that itch.
- Added DWR, Script.aculo.us and Prototype to simplify Ajax development.
- Added Beandoc support - simply run "ant beandoc" to see javadoc-style
documentation of Spring context files.
- Refactored UserManagerTest to be UserManagerImplTest; renamed
UserManagerIntegrationTest to UserManagerTest.
- Changed BaseDAOTestCase to extend
AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests.
- [Hibernate] Added example ehcache.xml to web/WEB-INF/classes for default cache
settings.
- [JSF] Removed client-side validation because corejsf-validator.jar causes
issues with Spring's Ant-style path matching.
- [Spring] Fixed number editor and edit logic in UserFormController.
- [Struts] Fixed issue with installation where ContextLoaderPlugin was loading
ApplicationContext a 2nd time b/c the listener was not being commented out.
- Dependent packages upgraded:
- Cargo 0.6
- Hibernate 3.1
- iBATIS 2.1.6
- JPOX 1.1.0 Beta 4
- MyFaces 1.1.1
- PostgreSQL JDBC Driver 8.1 Build 404
- Spring 1.2.6
- Struts 1.2.8
Download. For more information about installing the
various options, see the README.txt file.
Demos:
The basic Equinox download contains all the various web
and persistence framework options in the "extras"
folder. If you have issues replacing the web framework
or persistence engine, please
enter
an issue in JIRA and I'll build and
upload a customized version for you.
The past week has been great. Not only did I stay off the computer for most of the week, but I had a ton of fun with my Mom, Dad, sister, Julie and the kids. My parents flew in last Tuesday, and that marked the beginning of my Christmas Break. On Wednesday and Thursday, my dad and I pulled the engine on the Bus. Ironically, the first day we couldn't figure out how to get it out, but w/in 5 minutes of consulting How To Keep your Volkswagen Alive, we had the solution. The bus is a bit different from a bug - there's only 3 bolts (instead of 4) and one of them is on the inside of the engine compartment. Daddy's Bus should be ready for the shop sometime in January.
