Raible Designs

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?

Hug your kids

I saw this story in the headlines last week. It's a tragic story that I never expected to hit close to home. Today it did. The little girl, Macie, was one of the four girls in Abbie's ballet class. Julie and Jack used to hang out with Macie's Mom and little brother while Abbie was in class. I can't imagine what the father is going through right now.

Hug your kids. There's no such thing as showing them too much love.

Washington, DC

It looks like I'm going to be in Washington, DC on and off throughout the rest of the summer. Besides the regular touristy stuff, what's fun to do in this town? I'll be traveling with good friends from work, so I'm actually looking forward to the trip(s).

Happy Father's Day

Father's Day has been great so far. We started off this morning by opening gifts. The kids gave me some new framed pictures, as well as a whole bunch of huckleberries. I couldn't ask for better gifts. After that, we headed out to breakfast at my favorite joint, Pete's University Park Cafe. From there, we headed up to Tiny Town and rode around on the "Choo Choo Train". We stopped for ice cream on the way home and now I'm sipping a cold one while watching the US Open. Life is good.

Thanks to my Dad for being such an inspiration - I hope I'm as smart as you someday Pappy. Can't wait to see you in July!

Related: Father's Day 2005, 2004 and 2003.

Ajax on Rails with Stuart Halloway

There's a number of presentations I'd like to attend during this time slot. In particular, I'd like to attend Testing with Selenium and Simplified Ajax Development in Java with ICEfaces. However, Stuart Halloway is an excellent speaker and I'd rather hear him talk than learn something in another session. Hopefully other attendees blog about the aforementioned sessions so I can still learn something from them.

Agenda: Ajax, Libraries for Ajax (i.e. Prototype and Scriptaculous), Rails and Ruby.

There's probably 100 people in the room. Stuart did a survey of who is using Rails - I'd say the response was about 10%. He also asked who's considering it for future development. The response seemed to be around 25%. I'm sitting in the front of the room, so I probably didn't see the results as well as Stuart did. Regardless, it's interesting to see that most people in the room won't be using Rails, they're merely interested in it (or they wouldn't be in the room, right?).

The best way to play with Rails on Windows is called InstantRails. For OS X, there's Locomotive.

All the demos given during this session are available in the ajax_labs section at codecite.com.

Things we're going to look at: autocomplete, in-place Editing, searching, sorting, expando, drag and drop, sort, server-side validation, client-side validation, and prototype windows (Stuart prefers to call them divdows).

Stuart is talking a lot about how Rails works at this point, model objects, yml files, tests and sample data. One of the things that I find interesting about most CRUD-generation frameworks is they don't take tests into account. Ruby on Rails generates tests, so does AppFuse. If you work on a CRUD-generation project for web development, do you generate tests too? If not, don't be embarrassed, tell us. There has to be a good reason you're not doing this.

Now the audience is struggling with the concepts in Rails, how ActiveRecord works, etc. For example, one guy asked if it's possible to use JDBC with Rails. It's definitely a humorous question, but Stuart handled it quite well without ridiculing the guy. A couple of notes: Rails doesn't work well with stored procedures or composite keys.

Now we're looking at the view layer, in particular a show.rhtml template. It's pretty simple , but not very HTML-ish. Looks a lot like scriplets in JSPs. Autocomplete with Rails is mostly CSS-driven. To use it in a Rails view, you start with the following line of code at the top of your template.

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'autocomplete' %>

In Rails, when you want to render an Ajax response in a controller, you use the following at the end of your method.

render :layout=>false

This turns off any page decoration. It'd be nice to have something like this in the Java world - so you could turn off page decoration from SiteMesh, Tiles, etc. It shouldn't be hard to implement this in SiteMesh, but it might take a bit of work for Tiles.

Partials are Rails' way of creating fragments that are designed to be populated and returned by Ajax calls. Their naming convention is to being the filenames with an underscore. For example <%= render :partial=>'search' %> looks for a _search.rhtml template.

For Ajax development with Rails, you're not tied to using Prototype or Scriptaculous. However, since Rails has helper methods that emit the JavaScript, it makes things much easier. If you'd like to use Dojo, you'd have to hand-code the JavaScript into your RHTML templates, or write helper methods for Dojo. Stuart would like to see a Rails plugin that allows you to switch the Ajax helpers from one library to the other.

The last thing Stuart showed was Prototype Windows. This looks similar to lightbox gone wild, except you get better styling around the modal window. If you haven't heard enough of what Stuart has to say, checkout blogs.relevancellc.com. One of the most interesting things lately is he's been posting reviews of the various Ajax books.

The T2000 Arrives

I received my T2000 server from Sun yesterday, and now it sits in its original packaging in my basement. I may not even unwrap and install it. When I originally ordered the server, I heard you could blog about it and possibly win a free one. Since then I've heard different; there's a contest with many entering, and they're only giving away a couple of them. Because of this, I've somewhat lost my motivation to install the sucker. Partly because I know I'll have to send it back, and partly because it doesn't look that fast. Regardless, it's nice to have Jeff's setup instructions if I do decide to assemble/install it.

Right now, my schedule is packed full of client work - all the way until mid-June. So if I'm going to build this bad boy, it'll have to be as part of my "late night" schedule. Right now, that's booked with Spring Live, designs for the CSS Framework and AppFuse/Equinox development.

To further justify my lack of motivation, I don't think the T2000 will solve my OOM issues with CruiseControl and Ant. I've been talking with one of the Ant developers, and it appears to be caused by the <copy> task in Ant. With any luck, I'll find some time to setup CruiseControl and do some performance testing of web frameworks before the T2000 goes back in mid-June, but it doesn't look good right now.

Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work

Every so often, I get asked what my strategy is for "getting things done". This morning, I had a short session of mass productivity, and on my ride into work, got inspired to jot down a few tips productivity tips. Keep in mind that I grew up in the back woods of Montana with no electricity and I'm mostly Irish.

• Write stuff down. The first and most important means to getting things done is to keep a todo list. I keep mine on Ta-da List and update it daily, if not hourly. My two most important lists are "When I have time" and "This Week". I regularly re-order "This Week" for the current day.
• Quit reading e-mail and blogs. One of the ways I can tell I'm in uber-productive mode is my unread (or starred) mail piles up and I haven't read any blog posts (or blogged myself) in a couple days. I like GMail because I can easily star an e-mail after briefly skimming it. For some reason, flagging e-mail in Thunderbird or Mail.app doesn't work for me - I rarely go back and find those e-mails. With GMail, I'm always conscious I need to revisit starred messages.
• Work on open source late at night, with a beer on your desk. While I do get the opportunity to work on open source at my day job, I still find that I'm most productive at night. Maybe this is because no one bugs me via e-mail or IM, or maybe it's just because the world is asleep. The strange thing is I often find myself motivated at 3 p.m. for my 11 p.m. workload. However, when I get to 11 p.m., I'm not motivated to work on anything. I've found that cracking open a beer at 11 when I start helps me focus and quit worrying about all the other computer-related tasks I need to do. Also, on beer #2 or 3, you'll start to forget what time it is and really start getting things done. NOTE: this isn't for rookies. If you're a lightweight and get hammered on two beers - just go to bed when you start coding with one eye shut. It helps to sleep in the next day after doing this. If you finish off a six-pack before going to bed, it's probably best not to check your code in - you're probably going to spend the next day fixing it anyway. Regardless, this is a great way to get started on a new feature because you're less concerned about the details and more concerned about the big picture. I've also found that "bug fixing juice" can be great for fixing bugs - it gives you a different perspective on the problem. I told you I was Irish didn't I? ;-)
• Work disconnected. To further facilitate not checking e-mail or reading blogs, I've found that going to a coffee shop w/o connectivity is my most productive environment. They have liquid motivation in the form of coffee, and you can feed your brain with breakfast/lunch or some kind of snack. My most productive days are the ones where I show up at my local Einstein's (bagel shop) at 6 a.m., have two cups of coffee, and work with my headphones on. After the coffee and uber-productivity, I often have an awesome ride to work and barely notice the miles. NOTE: I've found that I'm more productive writing code late at night and authoring articles/books in the early morning.
• Listen to music while you work. Some noise-cancelling headphones and your favorite music can do wonders for your productivity. Of course, earbuds work just as well - whatever makes the music sound good. Good music can really help you "get into the groove" of what you're working on, regardless of whether it's writing or coding.
• Work long hours on Monday and Tuesday. This especially applies if you're a contractor. If you can only bill 40 hours per week, working 12-14 hours on Monday can get you an early-departure on Friday. Furthermore, by staying late early in the week, you'll get your productivity ball-rolling early. I've often heard the most productive work-day in a week is Wednesday.
• Avoid meetings at all costs. Find a way to walk out of meetings that are unproductive, don't concern you, or spiral into two co-workers bitching at each other. While meetings in general are a waste of time, some are worse than others. Establish your policy of walking out early on and folks will respect you have stuff to do. Of course, if you aren't a noticeably productive individual, walking out of a meeting can be perceived as simply "not a team player", which isn't a good idea.
• Sleep. While working late nights can be productive in the short term, doing it consecutively will burn you out quickly. Getting a good night's sleep can often lead to greater productivity because you're refreshed and ready to go.
• Work on something you're passionate about. If you don't like what you're doing for a living, quit. Find a new job as soon as possible. It's not about the money, it's all about happiness. Of course, the best balance is both. It's unlikely you'll ever realize this until you have a job that sucks, but pays well.

To follow up on that last point, I think one of the most important catalysts for productivity is to be happy at your job. If you're not happy at work, it's unlikely you're going to be inspired to be a more efficient person. Furthermore, if you like what you do, it's not really "work" is it?

Here is some general advice I give to folks about jobs and careers. I realize that I'm biased here because I have a good job and I've been fairly successful in my career. However, I also grew up with virtually nothing, and learned all my computer skills on my own. Therefore, I believe that anyone can be successful (meaning: happy with that they do, and financially stable at the same time) if they put their mind to it.

• If you're not happy at work, quit. I got into contracting early-on in my career (6 months out of college), so I got spoiled with good rates early on. It was also the late 90s, so you could easily switch jobs if you didn't like the one you were in. However, I've always had the policy that if you hate your job for more than 2 weeks, quit. It's just not worth it. Some people enjoy bitching about their jobs and complaining about their co-workers, so this doesn't apply to everyone. However, if you're truly miserable - quit. I've done this a couple times, and it's always led to better opportunities (even if I had to wait 3 months). Julie's done it once or twice and it's always worked out for the better. Once she even got a 20% raise by quitting her traveling-consultant gig with KPMG and going back to her old company, Qwest.
• Always try to be a contractor before a full-time employee. This especially applies to younger folks who don't need the security of insurance for the family, stock plans, etc. Contractors typically make 50% more than full-time employees and tend to be excluded from company politics that might make the workplace difficult to deal with. While you won't get billable vacation time, you will get the freedom to take however much vacation you want - as long as you get your stuff done. The higher rates can generally make up for the unbillable time while on vacation. However, if you travel too much for fun (or conferences, etc.), it's likely your year-end salary will equal that of a full-time employee. If you make good money as a contractor, you'll also get the opportunity to start your own company (to save money on taxes). This can be a great learning experience. The biggest fear that folks have about "going independent" is they'll have a hard time finding their next gig. If you're productive and blog about what you're doing, this shouldn't be a problem. I haven't had an "interview" since 2002 and haven't updated my resume since then either. Networking at your local JUG and conferences is key.
• Don't work at a company with a two-week vacation policy. I've never worked at a company with a two-week vacation policy, and I hope I never will. The two full-time gigs I've had in my career have had no vacation policy. This is usually only found in startups - but it generally amounts to "get your shit done, and you can take off all the time you want". My parents both work for the BLM (government agency) and they get 6 weeks off a year. Furthermore, they can earn "comp time" (more days off) by simply working overtime. If you have the ability to take time off whenever you want, it'll likely lead to you being more motivated to work long and hard - b/c you know when you finish that project, you're heading to Cancun for a week.
• Don't travel if you have kids. If you're single, traveling for work is pretty cool. New places, new people to meet - and seeing the world can be very cool. If you have a spouse, it's likely your desire to travel will decrease, but it's still not that bad. If it helps your career, it's probably a good move. It also helps to save money since everything you do is generally expensible. When Julie and I first met, she traveled 100% and made $20K more per year b/c of it. When you have kids, everything changes and traveling sucks. You miss their first steps, and when they get to toddler-age, they'll want to go with you. Hearing your daughter say "Daddy, can I go with you?" can be heart wrenching when you're leaving on a Sunday afternoon to spend a week with people you've never met before.
• Ask for more responsibility. If your job sucks, but the company is pretty cool - you may want to ask for a shift in responsibilities. I was once an HTML Developer at a .com. It sucked because we were constantly waiting on the Java Developers to fix bugs we found in their code. Finally, I got tired of waiting and asked my boss to show me how to fix the Java bugs. Granted, I wrote some pretty horrendous code at first, but my boss and co-workers helped a lot and w/in a year I was doing 80% of the Java Development.
• Most things can be learned by reading. If you want to learn something new (for your current or next career), the best thing to do is read. The world's knowledge resides in books and you can learn a lot. Of course, the best way to retain that knowledge is by doing, but reading is a great first step.

Those are my tips, many of them off the top of my head. I may add more as time goes on - but hopefully this helps in the meantime. Please share yours if you have any.

What happened to the design?

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information. Good idea - let's watch the web get ugly.

Back from Vegas

This weekend was one of my smoothest returns from Vegas in my life. It probably helped that Julie joined me there on Friday and we flew back together on Saturday. My BOF on Friday night was very well received and I heard a lot of positive comments about it afterwards. What do you expect when you give people free beer.

After the BOF, the Virtuas Crew had a kick-ass dinner at BOA Steakhouse in Caesar's. Before we were done, a college buddy of mine arrived in Vegas, so Julie and I met him at Harrah's for some blackjack and craps. We had an fun night of gambling with my buddy, who started with $5K at the first blackjack table. Apparently, Julie brought him luck and he ended up winning a few grand by the time the night was over. We had breakfast and walked back to Caesar's as the sun was coming up. We saw Gier and Hani catching cabs as we were walking in. 5 hours later, we'd had a good night's sleep and headed to the airport. We got sidetracked at Emeril's for lunch and enjoyed some good laughs with a couple friends before leaving.

When we got home last night, both kids had just fallen asleep. Of course, we wanted to wake them up, but also realized that sleeping children is quite a blessing. They were tickled to death when they woke up this morning and we were home. Today was a great day, and a big reason why it was so easy to transition from Vegas to Denver. The kids and I let Julie sleep in a little and took a stroller ride to the local bagel shop (a mere 3 blocks away) for a couple hours. It was a windy walk and we arrived home motivated to do some kite-flying at the park. We had fun at the park and it was super cute watching Abbie fly her first kite. After that, we headed to Dave & Buster's for lunch. Abbie never let me sit down because she wanted to play games the whole time. 2 hours later, we were on our way back home.

The day ended with Jack and I running errands. I needed to buy a new laptop backpack since mine got shredded in the wash a couple of weeks ago. We headed to Gart Sports, where I shopped and Jack stabbed stuff with a tent stake he found. He was like a hunter on the loose, crouching, jumping and yelling at stuff throughout the corner of the store we were in. It's a good thing no one else was around.

I ended up with the only backpack that could fit my laptop, which seems quite strange. I've been to the Apple Store, REI and Gart Sports and I've found the laptop backpack situation is abysmal. A couple of years ago, the selection was quite good. Oh well, I only paid $35 and I'll probably look for one online this week. The ideal backpack would have a built-in camelback and laptop holder (since I use it primarily when commuting on my bike).

After Garts, we headed to the Apple Store in Cherry Creek. I had to buy a new power cord for my MacBook Pro. I left mine in Vegas, possibly at the BOF. The Apple Store is pretty close to the "breakfast playground" - so I had to let Jack play in it. 15 minutes of jumping on eggs, waffles, climbing on bananas and sliding down bacon made Jack a very happy camper.

It's great to be home. AFAIK, I'm not travelling for a couple weeks, possibly more than a month. My next big trip is to The Ajax Experience and JavaOne in May. This week is supposed to be in the 60s, so I'm looking forward to a nice week of Colorado spring weather. With any luck, I'll get a signification amount done on both AppFuse and Spring Live this week. It might take a couple of late nights to make it happen, but I feel pretty motivated right now.

[TSSJS] Apache Geronimo Prime Time with Jeff Genender

I'm sitting in Jeff's talk now, getting ready to listen to him ramble on about Geronimo. The room is about half full, and it's one of the smaller rooms. However, people are still streaming in, and it's the furthest room from the main conference area.

Jeff started his presentation with a little "Open Source Arcade" fun. The cartoon depicted a pac-man game with JBoss and Geronimo and resulted in a loud applause from the audience. This talk is going to cover Geronimo's architecture, how to use it, how to configure it, what it doesn't have and address common concerns.

Geronimo is a conglomeration of best-of-breed open source projects. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Geronimo embraces and reuses other open source projects: Axis, MX4J, ServiceMix, Spring, ActiveMQ, Jetty, Tomcat, Derby, Tranql, Apache Directory Server and OpenEJB. There's many others, but these are the headliners.

Geronimo is a carpet roll. Just like a carpet, it allows you to roll-your-own application server. Rather than using all the pieces of J2EE, you can just pick the ones you need? Currently, Geronimo ships with a collection of pre-configured assemblies: j2ee-tomcat-server, j2ee-jetty-server, minimal-tomcat-server and web-jms-tomcat-server. The last two will be available in the 1.1 release. The nickname for minimal-tomcat-server is "Little G".

Why another J2EE application server? Because J2EE is now a commodity. You used to have to spend a lot of money for J2EE servers. Now open source projects have commodotize J2EE and flattened the landscape. Also, the other application servers are LGPL and Geronimo is Apache Licensed, which is much more friendly to businesses.

Geronimo isn't just an application server, but also a top-level apache project with a healthy and active community. There are many other components coming out of this project, including:

• The Geronimo API/Kernel/Assemblies/App Server
• GBuild - Open Source Testing
• DevTools - Eclipse Plugin for Geronimo Application Development with the Web Tools Platform (WTP)
• J2EE Specifications - open source versions, eliminating the jta.jar problem you get with Maven. In my experience, most of these work, but Geronimo's javamail implementation doesn't work last time I tested it.
• Home for OpenEJB, ActiveMQ, ServiceMix, Yoko (Corba) and XBean - all stand-alone sub-projects.

The Kernel of Geronimo *is* what is known as Geronimo. It controls the component (GBean) Lifecycle. A GBean is the Glue, the Wrapper, a Plugin to the Kernel. It conforms to JSR-77, the J2EE Management Specification and controls lifecycle, running states and naming conventions. The GBean architecture allows for simple development - you just need to implement the GBeanLifecycle, declare the GBean in a Plan (IoC) and deploy it. Plugging in 3rd party components is easy - for example Apache Directory and Quartz. Jeff wrote an article showing how to do this.

Jeff is now walking through the directory structure, which is pretty standard:

bin
config-store
deploy
docs
lib
repository (similar to Maven 1's structure)
schema
var

If you're familiar with Tomcat, Geronimo's "bin" directory is very similar. There's startup.sh/.bat, geronimo.sh and you can also use java -jar ./server.jar to start the server. Apparently, many of the scripts were copied from the Tomcat project.

Interestingly enough, my MacBook Pro's battery has been *much* more efficient today. I've been running for about 2.5 hours and the battery says it still has over an hour left. I believe this is largely because I've had my airport turned off most of the day.

Geronimo's Web Console is one of the nicer looking consoles I've seen for application servers. The user accounts for this are set in $GERONIMO_HOME/var/security/users.properties. It was donated by Abock (sp?) and I believe it's built on Pluto. For deploying applications, you can use the web console, drop WARs/EARs into the deployer directory or use the deployer tool (deployer.sh). When using the deployer tool, you'll need to have a plan file.

A plan file is an XML document (external or internal depending on nature of plan file). It's a descriptor to extend your application (setup JNDI DataSources, etc.) and similar to jboss-web.xml and weblogic.xml. Embedded examples: geronimo-application.xml, geronimo-web.xml, geronimo-ra.xml. For external plan files, you can use any name for the file. This file describes the GBean's attributes and references, as well as its dependencies. There are many different types of plans to describe information: web, application, resource adapters, security, naming references, EJB, schemas (in $GERONIMO_HOME/schemas directory).

The $GERONIMO_HOME/var/config/config.xml is Geronimo's central configuration file and allows you to override default values, as well as configure (or disable) GBeans. However, you can use the web console to configure everything in this file - and often it's much easier.

Now Jeff is going to do a demo of deploying and configuring Roller on Geronimo. This should be good, especially since he expects Murphy's Law, "if something can go wrong, it will", to come into play. He's showing us the plan file and how he had to hide a few classes, to prevent Geronimo's classes from conflicting. Jeff tried to show us how Geronimo allows you to download JDBC Drivers from w/in the console. Doh! We're in a conference room without an internet connection. Jeff had a backup plan and was able to successfully create a connection pool. After creating a security realm, he deployed roller.war and it all worked.

What Geronimo doesn't have? It lacks full clustering with respect to EJB/JNDI/Distributed cache. It *does* have full clustering with session replication and fail-over for the Tomcat web component, which fits 90% of clustering use cases. Uses Tomcat Clustering GBeans. Also, it can't run with Java 5 (only with 1.4.2) b/c the Corba component doesn't work with Java 5.

Now Jeff is doing Q&A, so I decided to try out my connecting to the Net via Bluetooth. It's actually pretty fast, GMail is surprisingly fast. From Bandwidth Speed Test, here are my results:

Communications: 87.1 kilobits per second
Storage: 10.6 kilobytes per second
1MB file download: 1.6 minutes
Subjective rating: Slow