Raible Designs

OS X on Intel Chips

There's a lot of rumors flying around now about Apple switching to Intel chips. Somewhat credible sources: Scoble, Gizmodo and CNET. The rumor I like even better is the (less credible) PowerBook G5s. IMO, Apple should switch to Intel, but stay in the hardware business. I'm still willing to pay for a kick-ass aluminum PowerBook - but I'd love it to be twice as fast as my current one (this is where Intel comes in).

Speaking of PowerBooks, it looks like I've got a buyer for the one I bought in Norway. I'm going to lose about $500 on the deal, but it's better than having two PowerBooks when I only need one.

Tapestry 4.0 almost done

Howard on Tapestry 4.0:

Now is the time is to get everything left in 4.0 wrapped up and finalized. Time for a beta, and then a goodly amount of bug fixing and documentation ... and a very tight schedule for 4.1.

Excellent, I'd love to have a beta to play with. Hopefully it's good enough for development. I'd love to get starting using Tapestry 4.0 with annotations.

The Technology Blahs

I think I've hit a point where I don't care about the latest and great techo-gadget anymore. Maybe it's just a phase, but nothing out there really excites me right now. I've never been into video games - they're too much of a productivity black hole and I know I'd be the type that'd stay up until 4 a.m. playing the latest XBox game. Therefore, I don't go there. PSP, XBox, etc. don't excite me b/c I'm fully aware of their addictiveness.

The other gadget I've often loved in the past is having a fancy bluetooth phone. Sure it's cool when combined with a PowerBook for synching and browsing the internet, but I've come to the conclusion that I don't need one. Maybe it's because I lost it in California last week and haven't missed it one bit. Cell phones - blaahhh - who needs them?

Lastly, there's the new OS X. I'm fully aware that someday I'll be enthusiastic about it, but right now I just don't care. I think it's because I've given up using my slow-ass PowerBook for the most part. I used it for 3 months at my current project and have since switched to a much faster Windows desktop. I've come to realize a couple of things about my PowerBook: 1) the slow problem is more a personal issue than a computer issue - I develop faster on Windows and 2) I enjoy a desktop much more than a laptop - where there's a real keyboard and mouse. If Apple will get off their ass and make a fast PowerBook, I'll get off mine and pony up for a keyboard and mouse. If there's not a dual core G4 or a PowerBook G5 this summer, I just might have to get a PowerMac G5.

Hmmm, I just went to the Apple Store to link to the G5 and there's a "We'll be back soon" sign. This implies a major announcement today. It is Tuesday...

Using DWR with Spring and Hibernate

For the past few weeks, I've been developing an application using Struts, Spring, Hibernate and the DWR project for my XmlHttpRequest framework. As you might remember, I used JSON-RPC for Ajax stuff on my last project. I found DWR to be much more full-featured and easier to use. This post is meant to capture some issues I encountered so others won't have to jump the hurdles that I did. For those of you that get bored quickly, here's a movie (QuickTime) of the app's Ajax features.

I've been using version 0.4 of DWR, and I haven't had a chance to try out version 0.5. When I first started using it, I ran into a ThreadDeath problem that was easily resolved by changing a log.debug message to System.out.println. I tried to reproduce this issue yesterday and couldn't, so who knows what that was all about. As far as configuring DWR in your webapp, that's pretty easy to do, and well documented. See the project's documentation or this Spring MVC HowTo.

Here are a few things I remember from my development experience.

• The examples are great, especially how to dynamically edit a table.
• When developing, make sure to set the "debug" init-param to "true". This allows you to go to http://location:8080/yourapp/dwr and see a screen that allows you to call methods on your exposed classes.
• In WEB-INF/dwr.xml, you need to specify a converter for each POJO you want to expose to your UI via JavaScript. I started out by converting a whole package, but found this to be *extremely* slow (we have a package of around 50 DTOs). So I changed it to be only the DTOs I was using. This turned out to take about 30 seconds to do the conversion, and was again unacceptable. The problem turned out to be that the converter was invoking all the lazy-loaded children for each DTO. My final solution was to create a NameValue object and only convert that. Then in my Spring bean, I populate it from DAOs and DTOs. I'm using Spring's OSIVF for Hibernate to ensure that DWR doesn't invoke lazy-loading.
• I had to override a few of DWR's JavaScript functions in util.js b/c they didn't work for me. I changed showById() and toggleDisplay() to use style.display='' instead of style.display='block' b/c this is what I've always used and block doesn't work that well. I also changed useLoadingMessage() to have a cleaner-looking load message.
• I used the Fade Anything Technique in this project and found that IE likes to have full 6-digit hex values for colors in CSS rules. The shorter 3-digit hex values simply don't work in IE.
• Using "test" buttons that only showed up for my username proved to be a great way to test the UI and the Ajax stuff. These buttons called a number of JavaScript functions to drive the UI and wait between invoking different functions using window.setTimeout.

All in all, using DWR was a great experience and I definitely plan to use it more in my projects. The client loves the app - especially since it's wicked fast and seems to work like a desktop app.

BabyBash - kids love it!

A few months ago, I saw Toby Reyelts' post about a game he wrote called BabyBash. I downloaded it when I first saw it and let Abbie play it. She loved it immediately, and would ask me to play it whenever she saw I was "working" on the computer. Of course, she'd say "Daddy - no working" first, and then say "play Abbie's game?".

Then I lost the link for a couple of months and this conversation turned very sour. A couple of weeks ago, I found the link and vowed to never let it go again. This morning, I gave Jack a run at the game (he's almost 8 months now) and he loved it too! It probably doesn't hurt that they're playing it on a 23" display.

If you've have small children, you should really let them try this game. Thanks Toby - you rock!

DU Kicks CC's Ass

Watching the game yesterday was a glorious event. I have a co-worker that's a CC Alumni, so a bunch of fellow DU Alumni (read: fraternity brothers) and I met at the same bar as he (and fellow CC Alumni) and heckled them the whole game. It was definitely a good time.

The bar (Braun's) sucked b/c they wouldn't turn on the sound during lunch (game was at noon), but they turned it on in the 3rd period and gave us drink specials so it wasn't too bad. It was a great day - leaving work at noon and kicking CC's ass! The national title game is tomorrow night - go DU!

It's funny to think that when DU won the title last year, I bought a bus. If they win again this year, that must be a sign to start restoring it!

DU going back to Frozen Four!

This past weekend I had a great time watching college hockey. DU played both Saturday and Sunday and won both games. This means they're going back to the Frozen Four. The best part? They're playing their arch rivals, Colorado College, in the first game next Thursday. Game starts at noon. Go DU! CC Sucks!

Microsoft's Agenda at the Competitive Influentials Summit

They said I could blog everything about the conference I'm going to tomorrow, so let's see how far they're willing to go. A lot of folks have asked me what the agenda is, and until now - I've had no clue. However, today I was sent an e-mail and I'm happy to let y'all know what's going to happen. One thing I noticed is that the Word document's title was "Competitive Influentials Summit". Heh - I guess I'm an "influential" now.

I'm really looking forward to this event. I think we're really going to get wined and dined, and maybe even learn something. It'll be the first time in my life that someone will be picking me up from the airport with a "Raible" sign. I'm leaving at noon on Thursday to do a little St. Patty's day celebrating with my sister (it's her birthday), so I'll miss the "Open Source and Microsoft" session. Hopefully someone else will blog that so we see what they're thinking.

Firefox and the lack of a developer community

Joe points to some interesting news about Firefox. The part that struck a cord with me is Mike Griffin's post about free products and burn-out.

As a co-author of a free product myself I know the kind of burn-out issues these folks are going through. Most folks working on free products need real jobs to pay the bills. This means they work on these free products late into the evenings and on weekends if it's a product of any real worth.

At first the thrill of a new project and the recognition that goes with it carries you through those tiresome evenings. You are creating something new and there are no bean-counters around to mess everything up. However, as time goes on, as with most things, the thrill begins to wax and wane, and after months of getting no more than 4 hours of sleep per night it begins to affect your health. You get sick more often than you used to, and you're main goal quickly becomes to merely get through each day. And then there's the guilt of spending too much time on it, when the basement needs painting, things need fixed around the house, and you're not spending enough quality time with your kids (and when you do you're the walking dead so it doesn't count). Finally, and much to your surprise, the project doesn't really turn out to be the big career booster you thought it was going to be. In fact, perspective employers are hesitant to hire you when they find out you have a mistress on the side pulling at your time and resources.

In the end, it's a matter of commitment. You've created something folks have come to rely on and they need you, you cannot walk away from it. You realize how foolish you were thinking that it was all going to be good times and not tough times (like at work) and then you hunker down for the long haul. There are ups and there are downs, in the end you a providing a free product and you have to pace yourself. There isn't a day that goes by that I didn't wish my free product was my real and only job, but it isn't, and I knew that when we started it.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I've definitely experienced the "affects your health" part, but I can't agree with the career booster part. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I believe my extra-curriculars continue to help my career.

That being said, I'm burned out on both AppFuse and Spring Live at the moment. Luckily, I'm committed and will be able to find motivation for both of these projects in the near future. There are sooo many nights when I work on these projects and I'd much rather just go to bed or weekends when I wish I could goof off and play with the kids. The nice thing is that I can choose to do this stuff. Users may scream and readers may complain, but sanity and family must have a higher priority.

I've only stayed up late once in the last two weeks and I didn't touch the computer for more than 5 minutes this last weekend. With this week being a 1-day work-week (the rest being spent at Microsoft and on vacation), I should be rejuvenated and enthusiastic about working for free again soon.

Brian McCallister hits the nail on the head with his comment. For an open-source project to remain successful long-term, it needs a strong developer community. "A project with a truck number of two is in deep trouble." Seems like recruiting new developers might be more important than new releases. Something to think about...

Is Laszlo a waste of time?

According to Rife founder Geert Bevin, Laszlo ain't all it's cracked up to be:

It's a shame, I really had huge expectations about Laszlo and even tried to sell it to a customer. I'm glad that project was cancelled or I would be in deep trouble.

Under normal circumstances, I'd dismiss this as FUD, but Geert sounds like he did his homework on this one.