The Angular Mini-Book is a
guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and
deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.
Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.
For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.
The JHipster Mini-Book is a
guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring
Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.
This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.
For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.
From CSS Beauty:
CSS Table Gallery. Showcase of how CSS and data tables can work together to create usable and pretty results.
I like Chrome de la chrome. Hopefully the available designs will grow so we can pick and choose the ones we want to use in our apps. I might have to use Chrome de la chrome with the Display Tag in the next AppFuse or Equinox release.
I got a good night's sleep last night so I'd be fresh and ready for the Smackdown today.
Matthew Porter, Scott Delap and I visited Jive
Software's offices last night and had a great time sipping suds in their
beautiful downtown office.
My AppFuse tutorial yesterday was well-received by a packed room of developers. Rather than writing code the whole time and doing a measly 30-slides, I added a bit more meat about Spring, Hibernate and testing. Most of audience was unfamiliar with Spring, so this seemed like the right thing to do.
Of course, this led to more talking and less coding, but most of the folks I talked to were nevertheless very happy with the tutorial. If you'd like, you can download my presentation from the event.
Thanks to Rob Harrop and Thomas Risberg for both letting me know about the lack of Spring experience, as well as sitting in on my session. It was pretty cool having these guys in the room, as well as SiteMesh/jMock inventor Joe Walnes. Without these guys, many of the cool features in AppFuse would not be possible.
Now I'm sitting in the beginning Keynote session at OSCON, where they've announced they have a record 2000 attendees this year. In addition, it looks like OSCON is in Portland for the long run - this is the 3rd year it's been in Portland. Rather than moving to a new city like they used to, they've decided to stay b/c conference attendees like it so much.
The "unofficial" tagline of the conference is fun. Open source is fun and exciting - both to develop and use. This is in stark contrast to closed source software that tries to stay stable and boring, with no surprises.
When O'Reilly's CodeZoo launched, it only listed Java open source projects. As of today, they've added python.codezoo.com and ruby.codezoo.com, in addition to java.codezoo.com.
Tim O'Reilly
O'Reilly is not just book publisher or conference producer - but also a company that looks to the future and tries to figure out what's next. To highlight this vision, they've created O'Reilly Radar.
We're currently going through "The Open Source Paradigm Shift". Integration of commodity components has led to a new model where value gets captured. Rather than being at the software level, it's at the services level.
Key Questions for Open Source Advocates
Things on O'Reilly's Radar
For more, go to the Visualizing Technology Trends on Thursday afternoon. For the first time, the computer book market has stabilized. This is a good sign that the computer industry is about to start rebounding. As far as the book market goes, it's market share and growth - Java still leads the pack by a pretty wide margin. A large reason of this is due to Open Source Java. SimplyHired.com spiders 7.9M jobs on 755 different job boards. General books on Linux are up, especially non-RedHat distros. Books on RedHat have decreased significantly.
This is an interesting conference to be at when you're a Java developer. For the most part, everyone seems to be Perl fans, followed by Python, and a few Ruby guys. Most of these developers are very vocal about the fact that they don't like Java. Then again, Java is the leader in many areas - and it's the open source way to hate the guy on top.
Kim Polese, SpikeSource
Building on the Architecture of Participation. A transformation from Do It Yourself (DIY) to Do It Together (DIT). Thanks to the architecture of participation, open source has achieved World Domination - as evident by governments mandating it and IBM pouring billions into it.
The architecture is characterized by:
In Phase I, we built and we built with. Open source had DIY origins. Now we're in Phase II, where increasingly the action is out in the long tail. Countless new building materials are piling up on the long tail. Now it's possible to build just about anything with anything. IT shops are building a phenomenal set of DIY "packages" that combine components from both ends of the curve.
The two problems with this:
To solve these problems, companies are developing formalized proceses like review boards, support centers, OSS incubation centers, testing groups and they're certifiying / defining stacks internally. Most of this work is laborius and not related to the core competency of the business.
What's next? Phase III - IT becomes core. They do this by offloading critical
but non-strategic work to independent service companies. DIY evolves into
DIT with the help of independent service companies. Of course, this is all
leading up to the fact that SpikeSource provides these services. It's funny
that as soon as Kim said "SpikeSource" - all the presentation screens in
the room quit working (not on purpose). A minute later they're back. This
goes to show that marketing is not liked by the Open Source Gods. 
"Testing is the single biggest refactoring shift in sofware." - J.P. Rangaswami, CIO, DrKW.
We need testing on a massive skale. For this reason, Murugan Pal and Ray Lane started SpikeSource. They saw the next phase is testing open source software so we can scale testing, together. Solve velocity mismatch and dependency problems with rapid per-defect patch management and dynamic stack configuration.
Testing has always been the software's ugly stepchild. We need to scale open source testing the way we scaled open source development. Some perspective: Microsoft has a 1:1 ratio of developers to QA Engineers. There's no Microsoft for open source software, nor should there be. To solve testing on a massive scale, you need participation plus automation. For models of how both scale, think eBay, Google and Amazon. Their best assets were their customers that supplied data that made their services more useful.
Testing is just one service among many. The Linux distros and middleware core building blocks have been there for awhile. Now we have applications and service companies as well. Who benefits when we have abundant integrated, tested, validated automatically patched stacks? IT and ISVs shift high-value development resources to customer-faces - differentiating features and services. In addition, many other groups benefit and higher quality software gets developed.
Testing will do for open source what it did for chip design a generation earlier. Testing is what catapulted the chip industry forward in the 80s. The new testing tools moved VLSI foward. Countless new IC-powered products were made possible and at much faster development speeds. Solving the testing problem can't be done by one company alone. "Come Test with Us..."
After Kim, another speaker (Andrew from OSDL) began his talk. He talked in a monotone and lacked a presentation. The room quickly began to leak people, me being one of them.
It's nice to see that someone is going to help make JavaScript code more standardized.
"The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third," said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. "These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support."
The Web Standards Project did a good job of helping evangelize and promote standards in HTML and CSS - let's hope they can do the same for scripting the DOM.
Philip Howard has a nice tutorial on creating pretty radio buttons and checkboxes using CSS and Javascript. Nice work Philip. Hat tip to CSS Beauty.
Managing Chaos
Building an Open Source Enterprise Service Bus from Scratch
Bruce Tate got rained out in Texas, so Bruce Snyder and Jeff Genender are talking about building an ESB with open source software. Bruce and Jeff created this product in the last project they were on. I was lucky enough to work with them on it the first half of this year - but only after the ESB was created. The final product was very stable and the client loved it.
Bruce is a Geronimo committer and one of the founders of the Castor project. Jeff is also a Geronimo guy and is currently working on a JBoss Live book for SourceBeat. The problem that the ESB was trying to solve was fixing a horrendous data flow. A lot of the data flow was occurring between people's PCs, shared drives, FTP servers, HTTP Servers, web servers - and rarely were things automated. Bruce recalls one of his first days when he heard the trading guys yelling at each other to "close the spreadsheet".
The solution to the problem was building an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that performed the following:
The pluggable components were called transformers and were standalone JARs that lived on their own, but could be managed by the ESB. Notifications were key so the traders would be notified when something went wrong.
Architecture
Scheduler (Quartz) » Workflow (jBPM) » Persisted Guaranteed Messaging (JMS). JMS talked to Activities (a.k.a. transformers).
The Quartz Java Scheduler is an open source project from OpenSymphony. It's a persisted scheduling engine, so it'll live through app server restarts. It also has millisecond granularity.
For workflow, the Java Business Process Manager (jBPM) was used. It doesn't use BPEL, and was used to track multiple activities and make decisions based on an activity's completion or failure status. Other functionality included tracking the activity state (running, cancelled, completed) and sending/managing notifications. Workflow was very important because the previous system had no way of detecting where things failed in a process. With the new system, downstream dependencies were handled, the escalation path was based on success or failure - and automatic retry occurred on failures if the failure reason was a known and configured expectation.
For messaging, JMS was used - implemented with EJB and MDB. This provided guaranteed and persisted messages. Events were automatically recovered if the server failed.
Activities/Transformers were pluggable components (wrapped with EJBs for transactionality). The nice thing about using EJBs was it was easy to create JARs for each transformer, drop them into JBoss and they'd immediately become available.
The system was all managed with a management console, that was a webapp implemented in Struts, Spring and Hibernate. Most of the Spring and Hibernate classes and configuration was generated with Middlegen and XDoclet. The management console allowed you to kick off activities, monitor their progress, as well as manage users with Active Directory and single sign-on with NTLM and jCIFS.
Solution Facts
Since December 2004, over 200,000 jobs have been run through this system. Of those, 500K activities have been run, with < 10,000 failed activities (2% failure rate). Nearly all failures were due to external issues, such as unavailability of remote systems and databases, or source files not available.
Tools and APIs Used
When Jeff showed up, it was a Microsoft shop using ASP, Visual Studio and some PowerBuilder. They brought Jeff in to help them use and adopt open source. The first thing they did was install and begin to use CVS (previously source control was done on shared drives). They also used Maven to build everything and produce a project site - which the managers and C-types loved. One thing they mentioned is they often got questions from higher-ups like "How much does it cost?" They did have problems with Maven, but it was mainly due to the poor documentation. They found a lot of Maven solutions by cracking open plugins and looking at their Jelly files.
Development Lessons Learned
Configuring EJBs and MDBs as singletons helped solve some problems (a JBoss setting allows you to configure this). As for running Spring in a heavily-managed environment, they found that setting singleton="false" solved a lot of problems. The next problem they had was mixing Hibernate and JTA Transactions. No details, just that they had an interesting time and it took them a few days to get it working. The last problem they encountered was using Hibernate and/or Spring JDBC to manage hundreds of thousands of records. Since these O/R tools create objects for each record, OOM errors occurred with large resultsets.
Business Lessons Learned
All notification messages came from the ESB, leading many to believe the problem was the ESB - rather than the data sources it was talking to. By using open source, they saved the company $500K in licenses fees. The interesting part was the company had a 3rd-generation agreement with IBM, and owned $12 million worth of licenses for WebSphere and WSAD. The reason this group used open source was because there weren't enough licenses.
Bruce and Jeff's presentation was good, but they looked like a couple of goofballs
standing up there in their t-shirts and shorts (standard Virtuas gear). I
guess that's what happens when you get a 2-hour notice. The worst part about
the presentation was the fact that the A/C doesn't work and it's about
85° in here. I told Geary he'd better keep in short or I'm outta here.
Ruby on Rails
David Geary
David got into Rails by reading an article called "Rolling with Rails". In the article, the author claimed that you can develop webapps in Rails at least 10 times faster than in Java. David responded to the article on his blog with an entry called the Ruby on Rails Koolaid. He experienced quite a butt-whooping from various folks, including Rails' founder - and realized afterwards that the claims might be valid. After working with Rails, David believes that Rails is probably 5-10 times faster.
Ruby
Potent mix of SmallTalk, Perl and Python. Everything is an object. No static type checking. Duck Typing (talks like a duck, walks like a duck, it probably is a duck). Testing usually solves the lack of static types. Blocks - like anonymous inner classes, but retain state. Mixins - a cheap way of doing multiple inheritance. Dynamic classes - can modify at runtime (add methods, renaming methods, etc.). Rails takes great advantage of the dynamic attributes as part of its framework.
David is now showing a ContactsController that has 5 methods for
CRUDing a Contact object. 4 of the 5 methods are one-liners. It kinda reminds
me of my Hibernate DAOs after integrating Spring.
Rails
Ruby-based MVC framework. Convention over configuration. Scaffolding - builds pieces of your application for you. ActiveRecord does O/R Mapping. Has a built-in testing framework. Near-zero configuration (no XML). Zero-second deploy time (development environment).
David's first demo is being done by audience member Kirk. David asked for
a volunteer from the audience with MySQL experience, and the ability to type
in a few commands. David said his 6-year old daughter was able to do this
demo last night successfully - so Kirk's gonna look pretty bad if he can't
pull it off.
Using scaffolding, Rails generates 1 controller, a test for it, a helper class, a css file and 5 rhtml templates. Kirk pulled off the demo, even though he had a bit of trouble with the Mac environment. This is a lot like AppFuse's AppGen in a sense - except AppGen has to parse a bunch of XML files and reconfigure them.
David keeps hammering that the most productive feature of Rails is that there is zero deploy time. Save. Refresh. It looks very similar to developing a static HTML site.
Rails has ActiveRecord, ActionPack (MVC), ActionMailer, ActionWebService, Ajax Support, Transactions and Security. Currently at version 0.13.1 - the last version before 1.0.
David is delivering an excellent presentation, but it's too damn hot without A/C - I'm outta here.
From the AppFuse mailing list and the Spring Forums, I learned about eXtremeTable. This JSP Tag looks similar to the Display Tag, except that it includes support for checkboxes and filtering columns out-of-the-box. If you've used this tag, please let me know how it's working for you.
Howard has a nice little trick for setting the default submit button on a form. Basically, you just put the default button first, and then use style="display: none" to hide it. For the most part, I haven't had any issues with putting the default submit button first (i.e. "Save"), but I have noticed an issue when developing wizards (b/c "« Previous" is likely to be first). Nice tip Howard.
Avoiding Classitis: A nice tutorial on reducing the amount of classes in your code for easier site maintenance. Hat tip to CSS Beauty.
I mentioned last week that my next professional endeavor was going to provide more time to work on AppFuse and Spring Live. Now I guess I should explain what my next big adventure is.
As most of your know, I've been writing Spring Live for SourceBeat. When I signed up with them in March of last year, their grand vision for the company wasn't just to write books - it was to become a training and consulting provider as well. They wanted us as authors to eventually write training that we could deliver on-site, as well as at our facilities in Denver. As far as consulting, they wanted to provide consulting in the true sense of consulting - where we give advice and help people implement open-source in their environments. Not the code-monkey kind of consulting/contracting, but rather the big dollar kind of consulting.
Now they've got an outlet for that venture.
Not only have they gotten funding for developing training programs and providing open-source mentoring to CIOs and CTOs, they've got the connections to make it work. Furthermore, we think we've established a team that will make this a tremendous success. Many of us have been independent consultants for quite some time - so we all have a certain desire to make things happen for ourselves without having any loyalty to a particular company, or person in charge. We've all decided to give up our independent status to build a company together - because we think this venture can actually provide more freedom than independent consulting provides.
If we do it right, we plan on doing training and consulting for a week or two per month, and then working on driving the open source movement the rest of the time. All of us expect to dedicate more time to the books we're authoring, as well as contribute more to open source projects. We also plan on writing more articles and trying to help out the community more - to promote open-source tools and make them easier to use through good documentation.
At this point, you might be wondering who "We" is. As of this point in time, Matt Filios is heading up the show. He's the current CEO of SourceBeat, and it's his ideas that've made SourceBeat a unique and fun publisher to work for. Starting this new company has been in his "idea bank" for quite some time, so it's great to see his enthusiasm and energy in getting this thing off the ground. He has a lot of connections and excellent business sense to make this new company a sure success. It's great to have someone in charge that you trust and feel confident about.
Having a business leader makes good sense for a company, but you also need a technology leader. For that, Bill Dudney has stepped up to the plate and will try to keep us focused and make sure we're not goofing off all the time. Bill's role is as Vice President per se.
From there, we're establishing a number of "Practice Leaders" that are experts in a particular area, and can provide training and high-level consulting for particular technologies. I will focus on my core expertise as the Spring and Web Frameworks Practice Leader. We have also added Bruce Snyder and Jeff Genender with their in-depth knowledge and expertise in application servers and databases, and will continue to add Practice Leaders in a host of areas, including operating systems (Linux of course), databases, and other applications.
The new company's name is Virtuas, and our headquarters will be in downtown Denver. Our new office is only a few blocks from my last contract, so I'm pretty pumped that I can continue to ride my bike to work. The best part about this new job is it's not really a job. It's starting a company, pursuing a passion, and doing the stuff I normally do at night and on weekends. I won't need to switch gears anymore when I go to "work", but rather just learn, promote and teach the technologies I'm passionate about. How cool is that?! 
Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework seems like it might be a good candidate for inclusion in AppFuse. In his article about this framework, he basically says that there are 6 basic layouts that "cover most of the blogs out there and most of the corporate sites as well". He shows you how it's possible to use a single XHTML page, and use CSS to achieve all of these layouts w/o changing your HTML. This is huge IMO because you can accomplish all the different layouts w/o changing your markup. Very cool. Hat tip to CSS Beauty.
