Raible Designs

What's wrong with JSF

The developers of Seam have come up with a list of major issues with JSF. I'm assuming many of these issues are fixed by Seam, but it's interesting to note how they've somewhat admitted that JSF has many flaws. Note that there's a lot of references to Struts and WebWork.

Hopefully many of these will be fixed in JSF 2. If REST support is an important feature for web frameworks, it'll be be interesting to see how the component frameworks handle it. It'd be great if they provided native support. Oh wait, then they'd be action-based frameworks.

Why such a busy week?

Lance sent me the following e-mail this morning:

Just saw your status message, I think you'd better blog an explanation!

"Matt Raible is getting ready for one of the busiest weeks of his life."

I couldn't think of a good reason not to blog an explanation, so here goes.

I'm currently sitting at Denver's airport ready to hop on a flight to Mountain View. I'll be at LinkedIn's HQ for two days helping tidy up plans for a release in early September that I'm in charge of. It's my first time being a Release Owner, but it should be pretty painless so I'm not too worried. Whenever I travel to Mountain View, I always have a good time, but I'm constantly being pulled into meetings, or arranging meetings myself. I have a presentation to write that I'm delivering on Wednesday. It describes the changes we've made to make the backend of LinkedIn much more stateless and therefore better and faster.

In my hotel room at night, I'll be writing my presentations for the Colorado Software Summit. Having to write 3 presentations in one week always makes me feel super-busy.

On Wednesday night, I fly home late (likely after a game of hoops with co-workers). Thursday is Jack's birthday, so I hope to take the day off and spend the day with him. Thursday night is sleepover night. Being a single parent with two kids is never easy, but always fun. Friday it's back to work, wrapping up things for the week (status reports, bug fixes, etc.) and likely marveling at the traffic from the DNC.

Friday night there's a 9-hour cocktail party with a good friend from Vancouver, BC.

Saturday is the super-busy day. It's time for Jack's birthday party and if last year is any evidence, it's one of those 8-hour cleaning and decorating situations.

I'm sure I'll have a busier week sometime in the future, but this one will surely be one to remember (especially since it's blogged into history now ).

New Passport in 9 Days

A couple of month ago, I discovered my passport was missing. I looked all around my house but couldn't find it anywhere. Since I'm going to Munich in September, I had to get a new one. So last week, I went to Denver's Downtown Post Office, filled out an application, gave them an original birth certificate, got pictures taken - the whole ball of wax. It cost me around $100 and didn't take more than 30 minutes.

I was amazed when my new passport arrived yesterday in the mail. That's a mere 9-day turnaround! The last time I had to get a new passport, it cost me $350, but I also got it in 2 days. It's good to see getting new passports is an efficient process these days.

EhCache Project Busy this Summer

The EhCache project appears to be having a very busy summer. EhCache 1.5.0 (a major new version) was released on July 12th. In addition, a new (SOAP-based) EhCache Server was released at the end of July. You might ask yourself why you'd need such a beast. I think Greg explains it best:

Why am I doing this? There are lots of theories that have made their way on to the ehcache mailing list. The prosaic truth is that a large US corporate using ehcache for their Java apps on 200+ servers also wants to use it for their C++ apps. And they are prepared to sponsor development. The Web Services API lets them do it. That's it.

As to the larger question of how interesting this is to the world at large, my view is not very. However having to jump through all the hoops to get a server infrastructure done, I thought that the world at large may be interested in a RESTful, resource oriented ehcache server.

The next day, Greg announces EhCache for JRuby on Rails. A few days later, RESTful, resource-oriented caching becomes available in ehcache-server.

I guess this helps answer the question about OSCache vs. EhCache. OSCache hasn't had a release in over a year and EhCache is pumping out new releases and new products. Well done, Greg!

At LinkedIn, we use EhCache for many of our caching needs. However, it's likely we'll be moving to Memcached in the future. Since I'll be part of the team that implements Memcached, it'll be interesting to see which one performs better.

Spontaneous Stuff Weekend

This weekend, I didn't have much planned to do with the kids. I had a couple ideas, but nothing set in stone. The good news is the kids were full of ideas and we kept ourselves plenty occupied. On Saturday, we went to Elitch Gardens. We rode the Light Rail and my stomach barely survived the 4-hour journey.

I was pleased to find out they served beer at Elitches, but regretted it shortly after as I was spinning with the kids in the Tea Cups. But that wasn't the worst ride. The worst one was Thunderbolt - that was the one I had to go on back-to-back with each kid (b/c they weren't tall enough to ride alone). Shortly after getting off, I realized I'd left my iPhone on the ride. Luckily, I rushed back to the ride and the operator was able to find my car and grab it from a very happy teenager.

Today we decided it'd be fun to take a hike. We gathered everyone in the car and drove just past Idaho Springs to St. Mary's Glacier. It was a nice 1.5 mile round-trip hike and both the kids and Cookie (the dog) had a great time. I was pretty impressed with the kids' ability to hike, especially over all the big rocks on the trail. Of course, when I told them they did so well, it only took Abbie 2 seconds to process and respond with "does that mean we get toys?"

Awesome Birthday Present: A Kegerator

I'm proud to say I have the best parents in the world. For my birthday this year, they bought me a kegerator. It was delivered last week, but I didn't get a chance to put it together until this weekend. I've never had so much fun putting together an appliance.

Since it's summer and I'm in Colorado, I decided to get a keg of Sunshine Wheat to start things off. So far, there's issues with 1) too much head and 2) it's not quite cold enough. I think the first can be fixed by playing with the CO2 tank and settings. The 2nd might only be fixable by moving it inside. If you have a kegerator and have advice on how to fix these issues, please let me know.

Why did your parents buy you a kegerator?

There's actually a good reason for this. A few years ago, Julie and I made an agreement that I could buy a kegerator when I paid off the last of my student loans. While Julie and I aren't a couple anymore, it still seemed like a good idea. I paid off my last student loan in June. However, it wasn't my loan, it was my Mom's. When I was applying for colleges way back in the early nineties, my parents said I could go to DU, but only if I paid for it.

My Mom took out quite a few loans over the years to help with tuition, and I finally paid them all off. When I was with my parents over the 4th, I joked that they should buy me a kegerator since I was paying off their loans. Lo and behold, my subliminal messages worked and I ended up with a tap at my house. I couldn't be happier.

Update: Speaking of birthdays, this is the first post I've had to start the 7th year of this blog. My first post was on August 1, 2002.

Update 2 on Friday: I haven't had a beer from the kegerator since Sunday. This evening I poured a fresh one and I'm happy to report the head and temperature issues seem to be fixed.