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.
You know you're good when your April Fool's joke gets picked up by a major news site.
With a fair bit of attention being given to using older Web technologies to create new Net applications, Microsoft is apparently looking to make sure it is staying up to date. The company has hired Java specialist Matt Raible to help make sure that Ajax is in Visual Studio's cupboard of tools.
I've been pretty fortunate in my career so far. A few years ago, I was attending Web Designer conferences, learning more about HTML, Photoshop and Flash. At those conferences, I admired the speakers, the relationships they had with other speakers and how they really seemed to be enjoying the "speaking lifestyle." I thought to myself, "that's what I want to do."
Fast forward to today and I feel like I've accomplished everything I ever wanted to in my career. Now I'm experiencing an interesting state of mind. I don't really know what I want to do next. I'm certainly enjoying being a consultant and getting new gigs every 3-6 months, but I know if you want to make any real money as a consultant, you have to travel. When I say "real money", I mean $200-$300/hour, which equates to $400K-$600K/year. The problem with consulting is I don't want to travel. At all.
So I can continue being a consultant, making pretty good money, but I'm yearning for something more. I don't know what the "more" is, but I feel like I should have a plan for the next 5-10 years. I've had a couple of good offers for full-time jobs recently. The problem is that full-time employment generally doesn't appeal to me. The main reason is because I don't want to take a 50% pay cut. The second reason is because I tend to take 2-3 months off per year, and finally - I never seem to be that interested in the hiring company's mission statement.
The 2-3 months off is probably a misnomer because many of those weeks are for conferences, but I doubt I'd find a company that'd send me to conferences and pay for it.
On Monday, I was discussing this with a potential employer/client - and it hit me. I think I need to share my career aspirations with a full-time employer's to make it work. Since I'm at a point where I I don't know what my goals/desires are - it's pretty tough for me to see myself working for anyone but myself. What I do know is that it would drastically help if starting the company was my idea. The problem with this is I don't really have the motivation to start my own company right now. Sure I have Raible Designs and all, but to make real money as a non-consultant, I think you have to have a product. I could hire a bunch of consultants, but I don't really want to manage people - it seems like it'd be more fun to develop, ship and support product(s). Then I wouldn't have to travel at least.
This is all to say that I don't know what I'll do next in my career. Heck, I don't even know what I want to do. One things for sure though - my current gig is one of the best I've ever had. Awesome team, good rate, great location and super-easy commute. I think I'd be a fool to quit before my contract ends at the end of the year.
What are your career aspirations for the next 5 years? The next 10?
One of the annoying things about JSPs is all of the dynamic (non-rendered) parts of the page still produce line breaks. This means that if you do a view-source, you'll likely see large blocks of whitespace.
The good news is you can get rid of this whitespace if you're using Tomcat 5.5.x. Just locate the "jsp" servlet in $CATALINA_HOME/conf/web.xml and add the following <init-param>:
<init-param>
<param-name>trimSpaces</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</init-param>
I tested it and it works great. This begs the question - why isn't this on by default? Source: Struts Mailing List.
Update: JSP 2.1 adds the ability to trim whitespaces.
So what's the best Java-based framework available today? It's a very close call, IMO, but I'd have to give the nod to Tapestry at the moment. I really like Tapestry's pure separation of HTML and components and the ability to create custom components without any Java code. That gives it an edge on JSF, which, like Tapestry is one of what I refer to as 3rd generation WAFs, that support components and a server-side event model.
He goes on to say that he'll likely continue to use JSF (with Shale) because it pays the bills and will dethrone Struts as the most popular - which will obviously lead to more gigs. I especially like this part of his post:
After I get client-side validation and file uploads added to Shale I want to turn my attention to Tiles integration, AJAX support and exploring Tapestry-like views that strictly separate HTML and component definitions. For me, those are the most exciting areas of Shale.
I agree that JSF definitely needs Tapestry-like HTML Templates. Shale definitely sounds cool, but I find it funny that it takes yet another framework to make JSF usable. 
Hopefully Shale will prove a lot of ideas worthwhile and end up as features in JSF 2.0.
Looks like I'm going to miss the good stuff today. There's a Company Store visit this afternoon
at 5:00 - and they're giving us $120 in credit. Damn, apparently the games are pretty cheap there.
They've also arranged for a Longhorn Demo during the company store visit. I did manage to get internet
access with my phone and Ben's charger - so I should be able to do some real-time updating this morning.
I think one of the coolest things about this conversation is we're learning about how software is developed on a huge scale. These guys develop more software than anyone else and they do it on a very large scale. Can you imagine developing software for 90% of the computer users out there?! That would be nuts.
Oh boy - now we have an audience member ragging on the guy for Windows. He thinks it should be open source because OSes are going to be commodities soon. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a closed-source Windows. But I also don't see a problem with closed-source Java. What's wrong with companies making money? The main reason I'm in this industry is to make money - so what's wrong with the corporations doing the same thing?
.NET CLR Architecture
Started work on the Component Object Runtime (COR) back in '97. It was a small incubation project in the MTS group round metadata and compiler integration. Several API's still use the "Cor" prefix and engine DLLs are named MSCOR???.DLL. Apparently, this was all announced at the '98 PDC in Denver. Lots of code/marketecture names to follow: COM3, COM+ Runtime, NGWS Runtime, Universal Runtime (URT) and finally the Common Language Runtime. The big unveiling of CLR was at PDC 2000 in Orlando.
CLR Design Goals: Simplify development and deployment for classic Win32 programmers. Unify programming models, provide managed environment and support multiple languages.
The CRL is Language Neutral and has a commons set of features (i.e. Generics) guaranteed to be in all languages. Supports strongly typed languages, dynamic languages and functional languages. Because compilers are always targeting MSIL and the metadata, you get for free: shared object layouts and cross-language inheritance, exception handling, reflection, remoting and integrated tools for debugging and profiling. MS is very excited about having Jim Hugunin and IronPython on board and they expect to add even more killer features for dynamic language authors in the future. I wouldn't be suprised to see an IronRuby implementation in the next year or two.
CRL Version 2.0: More class libraries: collection classes, serial port, etc. Generics, 64-bit support (IA64, x64). RAD support: Edit and Continue, Just My Code, single-click deployments. SQL Server: fiber mode, integrated security, loading. Avalon, Indigo and Windows Longhorn.
Is this a boring session? Yes, but I'm sitting in the front row today, so it's a bit easier to pay attention and take notes. I'm doing AppFuse development for the most part and taking notes while AppGen tests are running in the background.
The CLR will be hostable in numerous environments: ASP.NET, VSTO for Office, DB/2 Stinger, Oracle 11g and SQL Server 2005. Oracle and DB2 are out-of-process with v1.1, SQL Server will be in-process with v2.0.
ASP.NET 2.0 by Scott Gu
VS 2005 has a new feature - where you don't need to have a web server installed, it'll work off the file-system. A new project doesn't have any files in its directory - which is definitely an improvement. VS definitely looks pretty slick - you can switch the "compliance-mode" of your page from IE6 to XHTML Transitional. When you switch modes, it changes the code completion attributes - so you'll get much more options for IE6 than you will for XHTML. It also has full code-completion for JavaScript - and the options are based on your mode of operation. Accessibility checking is also included - you'll actually get underlines for elements that don't have all the required attributes. Java needs an IDE like this soooo bad it's not even funny. Can you imagine having full page/HTML validation and code-completion based on doctype?!
Scott did a master/detail screen with VS and made it look damn easy. Most of the audience oohed and aawed. It's cool and all, but the code in the .aspx pages is a lot like JSF - there's hardly any HTML in the pages! It does seem to have much better support for skins and themes - you can easily change the look and feel right in the IDE and there's a whole bunch of built-in themes. The one thing I really like is the page-backing classes have a pre-init() method that can use to initialize properties. JSF really needs something like this. It's a shame that frameworks like Shale have to provide this and it's not a part of the core JSF framework.
ASP 2.0 Beta 2 will ship in the next month. Heh, Scott just gave a demo adding security and authentication in about 20 seconds - complete with Remember Me. There's actually a "Login" control that doesn't everything for you, including validation. The membership system (database) will actually get generated on-the-fly. He follows it up by creating a signup page that creates new accounts in under a minute. I can't really bash on this, writing authentication for Java webapps is definitely harder than it needs to be. Of course, if you use AppFuse, you don't have to write it at all.
Time to run and catch up with my sister - have a good weekend y'all!
At lunch, I got to meet Scoble, which was pretty cool. He was wearing a blue Firefox shirt for those
that are interested. During lunch, he and his co-worker talked about
Channel 9 and what they're doing with it. Channel 9 is named "Channel 9" because this is the channel
that United (the airline) uses to allow passengers to listen in on the pilot's conversations. It's supposed
to be an avenue for folks to listen in on what's going on at Microsoft.
Now we're sitting in a talk titled Developer Community Outreach Efforts. The speaker is
named Sanjay. He's the VP of Worldwide Developer Evangelists, of which there are around 1000. Sanjay
believes that MSDN is way too large. It does have a lots of interop
and migration content for those that are interested.
Sanjay's trying to get ideas from us on what they can do better. The general feeling from the room
seems to be "why should we help you", "what's in it for us" and "why do you care now, but not before".
It's a tough room for sure. I don't seem much point in this whole talk. A lot of folks are telling
this guy what he (and Microsoft) can do to become better to be better citizens to the programmer
community at large. A lot of the conversation is centered on accepting open-source and providing
a clearer message about the platform (should be inclusive, not exclusive).
SQL 2005 and the Developer
Now we have a guy (missed his name) that's talking about how SQL Server 2005 will allow you to expose
web services directly from your database, without IIS involved. Apparently, it exposes queries and
stored procedures as web services using a native Windows DLL.
Ben asked about benchmarks for SQL 2005, specifically against MySQL and PostgreSQL. The MS guy
says that these vendors will need to do the "standard" TCP benchmarks, and do the comparisons there.
We all know that SQL Server would get their asses kicked, and that's why they don't do any direct
comparisons. While we're on the subject of SQL Server, why are most SQL Server databases so screwed
up? In my experience, SQL Server DBAs tend to be over-optimization freaks that are stored-procedure happy
and don't know much about making a database application-friendly. Maybe it's because all you need
is a SQL Server DBA Certification to get the job - and your knowledge is based on a book, not experience.
Next topic: Access. Access is not going away. "SQL Express" is supposedly the target replacement for
Access. It's throttled to prevent users from using it for a full-blown database. "You can never write
a bad query for SQL Server." This is a direct quote, and the guy's reasoning is because the optimizer
will change the query to be performant. Sounds like a bunch of hoo-ey to me.
Today, you can write extended stored procedures in C++ with SQL Server. This code is not sandboxed,
and can pretty much to whatever it wants. In SQL 2005, you can do this with C# and use VS.NET to
write the code and debug it. Apparently, they have a whitepaper on SQL CLR vs. ADO.NET and when to use
one over the other.
Product Development Process with Iain McDonald (Director, Windows Server)
Iain is from Australia, which naturally makes him fun to listen to, just because of his
accent. The purpose of this talk is to explain how they do things. Cross-org at Microsoft means
that that development is spread across 7 businesses, each organized under own leadership with individuals
p&ls.
Each group has a lifecycle model that they try to follow. Microsoft has thee different stages:
Product Definition, Product Development and then Product Servicing. I'm willing to bet their
product development cycle follows the waterfall approach (confirmed: "How agile are we? We suck."). Actually, this brings up something I heard
last night from one of the Microsoft Evengelists. Apparently, each developer has two QA folks that
write tests (read: code) against their code.
Suite of Project Tools
Iain admits that security in 2000 was an afterthought and the security guys were seen as some mangy
dogs over in the corner. Bad RAM causes 20% of Windows crashes - who knew?! Bad RAM on OS X has certainly
affected me in the past. I couldn't upgrade to Panther b/c I had 3rd party RAM in my PowerBook.
Microsoft is in a competitive battle against other companies, not the free world. No corporation in
their right mind is going to download and install a free version of Linux - most are going to buy
a distribution from companies like Red Hat or Novell. Iain claims that there's no way you can
install Linux (at a corporation) for less money than Windows Server. It sounds to me like MSFT is willing
to give you some discounts on Windows Server if you're thinking of buying Linux.
Break time. I'm definitely bored, but happy to have some time to work on AppFuse. Some guy asked me in the hall why I haven't asked more questions. I told him because I don't develop for Windows. For the most part, none of this stuff matters to me.
Windows Architecture
Now we're listening to two guys talk about Windows and how it's developed. Windows XP and
Windows 2003 Server are two separate code bases. It's a nightmare to maintain b/c they have to
patch one code base and the other one as well. Longhorn is componentized, so it should be easier
to build client, embedded and server products. Someone asked about legal vs. technical reasons
behind the componentization. Apparently, it's all for technical reasons, and they have to separate
Windows Media Player for the EU, but that's about it. 40% of blue screens are from device drivers, and Longhorn
has done a lot to handle this and reduce crashes.
This talk centered on XAML, WinFX and Longhorn - what they are, what they do and when they're
scheduled for release. <Yawn/> While it has been a boring day (for me) technically, I do have
to admit that the speakers have been great. They're dynamic and enthusiastic, which is more important
IMO than good technical content. They also seem to be very open (as a whole) to ideas and criticisms.
I think I'm just a bad audience member.
OK - here's something that's interesting. We're talking about IE 7 and its features. The top priorities
are to stop spyware, fishing and any other security issues. #2 is tabs and #3 is CSS compliance. These
priorities are based on user feedback and sound like good choices to me.
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...
Matthew Porter and I are going to try something a bit different at this year's OSCON. Rather than just getting up in front of the crowd and spewing our technical know-how, we're actually going to make a go at providing some entertainment. I've been to a lot of conferences and I'm tired of just watching someone talk - I'd rather see a good presenter over a knowledgeable presenter. This has inspired our OSCON 2005 talk:
This presentation has a unique delivery style. Rather than one person
doing a comparison, there are two presenters - each which is an expert in
the framework they're defending. The presentation is delivered as a
friendly comparison/debate, which hopes to add some humor in to make
it fun for the audience.
Java web developers often have a difficult choice when choosing a web
framework these days. There are currently more than 35 open-source
Java web frameworks available. How do you which one to use for your
project? This presentation picks two of the most popular frameworks,
Spring MVC and WebWork and compares and contrasts their features. Topics
will include:
1. View options - i.e. Velocity, JSP, HTML Templates (ala XMLC), etc.
2. Testability - How easy is it to unit test with JUnit, with examples
3. Type conversion - i.e. Date, Integer, etc.
4. Validation - How do do it, stengths and weaknesses
5. Tools Support
6. Strengths and Weaknesses
Now the pressure's on - we have to both teach and entertain the audience. Please feel free to post your experiences with Spring or WebWork and why you think one is better than the other.
Found via Brian McCallister - a codefest grant has been awarded to Dave Tiu to reproduce the Display Tag in Ruby/Rails.
Codefest Grant recipients: 1. Ruby Displaytag (Dave Tiu) A port to Ruby/Rails of a popular Java/Struts library for displaying and interacting with HTML table presentations.
Maybe if I wait a little longer to write my first Rails app - they'll add client-side validation too.
You gotta admit, the Simple Web Framework does look interesting with all of the recent Ajax talk:
The Simple Web Framework (SWF) is an event based framework targeting Struts developers who want to build rich Web applications but do not want to migrate to JSF. The SWF is built upon the same Jakarta commons basis as Struts, but uses a different request processor (front controller.) The SWF event model supports form/submit style event posting, similar to VB.NET or JSF, as well as XmlHttpRequest based event posting with In place Page Updating (IPU) rather than page reloading, similar to the techniques underlying gMail. Read the SWF Overview for additional information.
My hope is that all web frameworks have some support for IPU by the end of the year. Then I won't have to build it into AppFuse.