Raible Designs

What a great vacation

We just rolled in last night from our family road trip to Montana. It was definitely a long drive - taking 2 days both ways. Yellowstone was awesome. We arrived at Old Faithful just minutes before it went off. We also strolled around a number of geysers and Abbie loved all of them. They were very beautiful and easily the best part of the drive up. Abbie even got to go fishing for the first time, in the Snake River just south of Yellowstone.

Once we got to the cabin, a great time was had by all. We attended the local 4th of July festivities and I got to catch up with some folks I went to grade school and high school with. It was fun meeting everyone's kids and spouses, and you can't beat the beer prices in Montana ($1.50 for a cold Bud Light). Abbie loved all the horses running around.

On the eve of the 4th, we had an excellent fireworks show and also broke ground on The New Cabin that my dad is building. Julie had a lot of fun operating the Excavator. The rest of the week was spent swimming, fishing, taking saunas, and tearing off the roof of the cabin. My mom even bought a 4-wheeler, which was a blast to ride around. I'd longed for one ever since I knew what they were, so it was pretty cool to have a childhood dream come true - in the same location I'd always wanted one.

I definitely recommend the road trip thing if you have kids. It was a great way to spend quality time together and enjoy some of the beautiful world we live in.

As for e-mail, that wasn't bad at all - only 243 messages. We had so much fun on this trip, I think we're going to include the drive up as part of the tradition. It's neat to think that I'll be taking the same vacation every summer for the rest of my life. It'll be especially fun to watch the kids grow up and how their perception changes each year. Now I just need to figure out a way to spend the whole month of July in Montana. Those Europeans are smart - we all need to take a month off in the summer.

Off to Big Sky Country

In only a few more hours, we're heading on Raible Family Roadtrip #9. Number 7 was when Julie, Abbie and I traveled up the California coast, and number 8 was when my Dad and I drove my '66 Bus to Denver from San Diego. This time it's going to be much more special. The end destination is my favorite place on earth. We're heading for the cabin, which is a log cabin my grandpa built in 1918. I was born in one corner, my sister in the other, and I spent the first 16 years of my life there.

Spending the 4th of July at the cabin has been a long standing family tradition. It's always fun to watch the parade and the O-Mok-See in the small town I grew up in. The Swan Valley is a very special place and my friends that visit often return. It really is one of those uniquely special places on Earth.

I love road trips. Julie hates them, but tolerates the fact that I love them. The main reason we're not flying to Montana is because the flights are very expensive. It's a 1 and 1/2 hour plane ride and a 15-hour drive in the car. It's a good thing we have a DVD system in our Odyssey for the kids - 15 hours is a heckuva long trip.

While I was at JavaOne last week, Julie did some research and discovered that Yellowstone isn't too far out of our way, so we're staying there tomorrow night. I've been to Yellowstone a few times, and every time it takes my breath away. I can't wait to see the look on Abbie's face when she sees an Elk right outside her window.

The best part about the whole trip? It's sure to be the family, laughing and creating memories. But I'm also going unplugged - which I haven't done in a while. For the next week, I'll be without a laptop and refusing to check voicemail or e-mail. E-mail is going to suck when I get back, but the peace of mind while I'm gone is sure to be priceless.

Web Framework Comparison Whitepaper

Working at Virtuas in June was really a lot of fun. We worked a fair amount preparing for JavaOne, and also found time to work on a number of whitepapers. These whitepapers are part of an Open Source Landscape Series that has been posted to Virtuas's site. For your convenience, here's a current list:

• Java Web Frameworks
• The Java IDE
• Application Servers
• Open Source Databases
• The 7 Basic Truths About Open Source
• Closing the Open Source Compliance Gap

In addition to the whitepaper, I also wrote an article for JDJ that'll be showing up in the July issue.

[JavaOne] Web Frameworks and Birthday Celebrations

Yesterday was a fun afternoon. James Goodwill and I sat in the same room for 3 hours and watched 3 different presentations: Tapestry in Action, JSF and Spring and the Web Framework Smackdown. The Web Framework Smackdown was particularly enjoyable. It was great to see all the framework guys "duke it out" and there were plenty below the belt comments. After that, we hit a bunch of the Birthday Celebration festivities, including Free Booze, an Art Auction and Dennis Miller. Unfortunately, we missed Zepperella - an all-female Led Zeppelin cover band.

Following JavaOne festivities, we met up with the Geronimo guys - only to discover they had just passed the TCK for J2EE 1.4. This resulted in many hours of celebrating and good times. As usual, I took plenty of pictures.

Today I slept in because I know I won't get any sleep when I get home (parents with small children hardly ever get to sleep much). I attended the Web Tier Expert Group meeting this afternoon, which was really great. We had folks from JSF, JSP and the Servlet teams, all trying to figure out what's next and what we need to do to make web development in Java easier. There were a lot of great ideas, and the next versions of all 3 specs should really improve things.

[JavaOne] Tapestry in Action

Last night was much milder than the previous night, and I actually feel pretty good today. I'm sitting in Howard's Tapestry in Action session, having just missed the session on Shale. This is a introduction to Tapestry, but it seemed like the most interesting session for this time slot.

Yesterday was a long day, mainly because of the Bomb Squad festivities from Monday. I did a book signing and actually managed to sign a few books. Spring Live is now #11 on the best sellers list at JavaOne.

Last night was a good time. We hit the Mergere party and learned a bit about Maven 2. It was cool to learn that Ant 1.7 is going to include Maven 2's dependency resolution. From there, we tried to go to a session on APT, but the room was packed and lacked A/C, so we bailed. From there, a whole slew of us (from Virtuas) went to a Southeast Asian restaurant that served excellent food, family-style, for hours on end. We hit the Tangosol+Solarmetric party after that and closed down the place. Click on the image below to see a bunch of pictures from the event.

Tonight, there's a big party at Moscone - complete with comedian Dennis Miller.

[JavaOne] Pictures from Monday

Click on the image below to see a bunch of pictures from the first day at JavaOne.

[JavaOne] Programming Puzzlers with the Google Guys

I'm sitting in a session titled "Yet More Programming Puzzlers" by Joshua Block and Neal Gafter. The other two sessions I chose for this time slot were Groovy and EJB 3. The main reason I chose this session is I've seen these guys in action before and they're excellent speakers. As part of this conference, I'd like to learn a bit about technology - but I'm more interested in becoming a better speaker. This is only my second of the day, with the first being the general session this morning. The afternoon has been spent networking, doing some Virtuas booth time, and presentation a short talk on AppFuse on the java.net booth.

In other news, it's pretty cool to see that BEA is going to start supporting Spring and Struts in its tools and servers.

The BEA WebLogic Workshop and other tools will be designed to allow applications to be built or blended from leading open source frameworks, including Apache Beehive, the Spring Framework and Apache Struts, and can then be deployed on BEA WebLogic Server. BEA will also certify the BEA WebLogic Workshop tools for Apache Geronimo and Apache Tomcat.

The Google Guys session? Entertaining and packed. All chairs were filled and many people were standing in the back and on the sides.

Made it to JavaOne

I arrived in San Francisco at 8:30 this morning, and headed downtown to the Moscone center. I've been sitting in the "General Session" room for the last couple of hours, and there's been some interesting announcements. You can get a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation for $30/month and it comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. The guy on stage made it sound like a screaming machine, but it was also a Sun sales pitch.

Another announcement is they're dropping the "2" from J2EE and J2SE. Now we're not supposed to say the "J", but rather "Java". Now it's called "Java EE". I think the 2 needed to be dropped, but I think it'll take a while before Java EE has the same ring as J2EE. I can already see folks calling it "Java, eh".

[ANN] Equinox 1.4 Released

This release is mainly to support Spring 1.2.1 and Hibernate 3.0.5. The default database is now PostgreSQL because of an issue with Hibernate 3 and HSQL. All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. Detailed release notes are below:

- Added "typeMismatch.java.util.Date" key to messages.properties (for Spring) to display a friendly error for invalid dates.
- Changed to use PostgreSQL as the default database because of an issue with HSQL and Hibernate 3.0. Read more »
- Added "clear" target to build.xml for clearing out the database.
- Added MySQL JDBC Driver and jdbc.properties.mysql for easy switching to MySQL.
- Changed UserWebTest (jWebUnit test) to get lastInsertedId from UI using HttpUnit rather than using UserManager (Richard Easterling).
- Changed spring-sandbox.jar to springmodules-validator-0.1.jar since Commons Validator support for Spring has moved to the Spring Modules project.
- Changed all Spring XML files to use new "value" and "ref" attributes.
- Dependent packages upgraded:

• Cargo 0.5
• Log4j 1.2.9
• Hibernate 3.0.5
• iBATIS 2.1.0
• OJB 1.0.3
• Spring 1.2.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring
• JSF
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

The basic Equinox download contains all the various web and persistence framework options in the "extras" folder. If you have issues replacing the web or persistence framework (or both), please enter an issue in JIRA and I'll build and upload a customized version for you.

Flying all over the place

I had a tremendous amount of fun this past weekend. On Friday, I flew from Denver to New York City (JFK) to attend a good friend's wedding. Friday night was the rehearsal dinner, followed by a night on the town at Webster Hall with a bunch of old college buddies. We didn't get home until 5:00 a.m. that night. Saturday we had lunch at Gramaldis in Brooklyn, which is supposedly some of the best pizza in NYC. It was definitely cool to be right in the heart of the city, eating great pizza and sipping on cold Coronas.

The wedding was held on Saturday at the Hammond Museum in North Salem, NY. The ceremony was outside in a Japanese Garden and it couldn't have been a more perfect setting. That night we were up until 4, and I woke up at 7:30 to catch a cab, train, bus and plane to get me back home. Now I'm heading to the airport to catch a flight to JavaOne. Should be a fun week.