Raible Designs

What would you like to see at TSSJS 2010?

A couple months ago, I was asked by TheServerSide to speak at next year's TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. In addition, they asked me to help them evaluate presentation proposals and suggest topics/speakers.

First of all, I think the biggest thing that TSSJS could do to improve is to host more networking events. With the JavaOne Party being over, I think there's a tremendous opportunity to fill a gap in the networking needs of the Java Community. When I first attended TSSJS in 2006, there were a fair amount of parties and everyone got to interact quite a bit. In 2008, there were no networking events. I believe having a strong networking story would attract a lot more attendees, companies and sponsors.

Secondly, I think it's possible that TSSJS has too many server-side related sessions. IMO, the server-side (and middleware in general) isn't that exciting. TechTarget appears to own TheClientSide, so why not add some more client-side stuff to the mix? For example, I'd love to see a Struts 1 app-makeover using different technologies (for example, Flex, GWT and jQuery). I think HTML5 and Google Wave's Architecture sessions would be interesting too. If adding client-side sessions is too far away from TheServerSide, maybe it should be renamed to TheServerSide JVM Symposium and there can be all kinds of sessions on JVM languages (e.g. Scala, JRuby, Groovy) and all the great things those languages can accomplish.

Lastly, I've been asked to send a couple session proposals. Currently, I'm thinking about a doing GWT vs. Flex Smackdown with James Ward, but I'm open to other ideas. It's been quite awhile since I did a "Comparing Web Frameworks" talk. Maybe "Hot Web Frameworks for 2010" is more appropriate? I also think it'd be interesting to do a somewhat philosophical talk on "The State of Web Frameworks" and where we're headed in the next year.

What would make you want to attend TSSJS next year? Let me know your thoughts and I'll do my best to make them a reality.

Update October 22, 2009: Whoo hoo! It looks like TheClientSide will be a part of TSSJS Vegas next year. Should be a great show.

Life Update: New Treehouse, New Kittens and More

It's been awhile since I wrote a life update post so here you go. After returning from Jason and Holly's Wedding in Florida, I took the next week off to "catch up on life". Having a vacation at home with no packing and lots of time to wipe my "to do" list clean was great. Not only that, but the weather was beautiful all week. If you ever get a chance to take a "catch up on life" vacation, I highly recommend it.

New Treehouse
I started out the week by doing something I've been telling the kids I'd do for the last year: building a treehouse. I used this tutorial as a guide for the "foundation" and had a lot of fun doing it. The best part was discovering my Dad had stocked my garage with many tools over the last couple years. I had to make several runs to Home Depot and Ace Hardware for building supplies, but rarely had to buy any new tools. My Dad has been a carpenter for over 30 years (he used to do it for a living in Montana). I was pleasantly surprised to discover some of his skills have rubbed off on me. We still need to build the structure on top of the platform, but everyone is happy with the results so far.

AppFuse
After finishing Phase 1 of the treehouse, I started working on the next version of AppFuse. I've made good progress so far:

• Archetypes now include all the source from web modules.
• Archetypes are now created using archetype:create-from-project, making things easier to maintain.
• Switched Cargo from downloaded Tomcat to embedded Jetty, allowing for faster builds.
• Upgraded to Struts 2.1.6 and Tapestry 5.0.18.

There's still lots of open issues, but I believe there's a lot of value in starting the "working on the next version" process. With the way things are shaping up, I'm considering bumping the version to 2.5 or 3.0 instead of 2.1. 3.0 might be a little ambitious, but there are going to be a lot of improvements.

New Kittens
Last weekend, I decided it was time to create some happy kids and get some pets in my house. On Saturday, we set out on a quest to find some kittens. We visited a couple shelters and a couple pet stores, but came home empty handed. We didn't look Sunday because we had more important things to do. On Monday, we hit up craigslist and found our kittens with a family in Thornton. Upon arrival, I figured they'd be good since the family had a 6-year old, a 4-year old and a 1-year old that was carrying a kitten around by the tail. At least their new home is slightly less chaotic than their last one.

Eye Surgery
Today is my last day wearing glasses. Tomorrow morning, I'm scheduled to receive PRK eye surgery at TLC Laser Eye Center. I'm nervous about the procedure and dreading the recovery. My mom is flying in tonight to assist me while I'm blind and in pain, so hopefully it won't be too bad. A co-worker has lots of books on tape that I'm borrowing to pass the time.

My life is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon, but I will have lots of opportunities to relax. In two weeks, I'm heading to Cancun for a friend's wedding. Having a week on the sunny beaches of Mexico is always fun. My current contract expires a couple days after my return. I'm currently negotiating with a few potential clients and hope to have my summer work plans solidified before leaving for Mexico. More than anything, I'm looking forward to taking the entire month of July off and spending it at our cabin in Montana. My Dad is moving up there to work on The New Cabin and there's nothing I'd rather do than help him out.

Ajax Framework Analysis Results

Way back in January, I wrote about how my colleagues and I were evaluating Ajax frameworks to build a SOFEA-style architecture. To make our choice, we used the following process:

1. Choose a short list of frameworks to prototype with.
2. Create an application prototype with each framework.
3. Document findings and create a matrix with important criteria.
4. Create presentation to summarize document.
5. Deliver document, presentation and recommendation.

When I wrote that entry, we had just finished step 2 and were starting step 3. I first wrote this blog post a week later, when we delivered step 5. Here is the comparison and conclusion sections of the analysis document we composed.

Framework Comparison
In order to evaluate the different frameworks against important criteria, we created a matrix with weights and ranks for each framework. This matrix shows how our weighting and rankings lead us to the winner for our project. You can view this matrix online or see below for a summary.

Note: Criteria whose values were identical across all candidates were weighted at zero. Charting capability was weighted at zero b/c we decided to use Flash for this.

This matrix indicates that GWT is the best candidate for our team to develop SOFEA-style applications with. In addition to the matrix, below are graphs that illustrate interesting (and possibly meaningless) statistics about each project.

Conclusion
After working with the various frameworks, we believe that all the frameworks were very good and could be used to write applications with. If all weights are equal, these frameworks were almost even when compared against our evaluation criteria. The graph below illustrates this.

Even after applying the weighted criteria, the evenness doesn't change a whole lot.

Without considering the even or weighted criteria, we believe the decision all comes down to what the developers on the project feel they will be most comfortable with. If you're developing with Dojo or YUI, chances are you're dressing up existing HTML and possibly using progressive enhancement to add more rich functionality. On the other hand, Ext JS and GWT are similar to Swing programming where you build the UI with code (JavaScript for Ext JS, Java for GWT).

The tools available for JavaScript development have gotten increasingly better in recent years. IntelliJ IDEA has a JavaScript Editor that provides many of the same features as its Java editor. Aptana Studio also has excellent support for authoring and debugging JavaScript. However, we believe the Java debugging and authoring support in IDEs is much better. Furthermore, we are more familiar with organizing code in Java projects and feel more comfortable in this development environment.

Based on this evaluation, we believe that GWT is the best framework for our team to develop SOFEA-style applications with.

Flash Forward to Today...
The core GWT library from Google doesn't have a whole lot of widgets, nor do they look good out-of-the-box. So early on, we experimented with two alternative implementations that continue to leverage GWT concepts and tools:

• GXT: a GWT version of Ext JS
• SmartGWT: a GWT version of SmartClient

Unfortunately, over the past few months, we've found that both of these implementations are too heavy for our requirements, mostly because of the file size of the generated JavaScript code. For example, a feature I wrote generated a 275K *.cache.html file using GXT. After determining that was too slow to give users the initial "pop", I re-wrote it without GXT. After a day, we had an application with *.cache.html files of 133K. Yes, that's over a 50% reduction in size!*

Because of these findings, we are proceeding with the core GWT library from Google and adding in new components as needed. It is cool to know you can make a UI "pop" with GWT, as long as you stick to the core - close-to-the-metal - components. For those applications that can afford an initial "loading..." state, I'd definitely recommend looking at GXT and SmartGWT.

* To make refactoring easier, I copied GXT MVC into our source tree and modified all imports.

Modularizing GWT Applications with GWT-Maven

Last week, I spent some time modularizing the GWT application I'm working on. By modularizing, I mean splitting the code from one GWT module into a "core" and "webapp" module. The reason for doing this was so the "core" module could be used by another GWT application. Creating GWT Modules is fairly straightforward, but it wasn't as intuitive as expected when using the gwt-maven-plugin.

The hardest part of moving the code was figuring out how to run tests in the new "core" module. After getting it all working, it seems easy enough. Hopefully this post will make it easy for others. Here's the steps I'd recommend:

1. Convert your GWT project into a multi-module project where you have a top-level pom.xml and two sub-modules (e.g. gwt-core and gwt-webapp).
2. Do the normal single-to-multi-project Maven stuff like declaring the <parent> element in the modules and moving plugins/dependencies to the top-level pom.xml.
3. Refactor your gwt-webapp project to push down all shared classes (and their tests) to gwt-core.
4. In the gwt-core project, include *.xml and *.java in your JAR so GWT can extract/compile the source code when building gwt-webapp.

   <resources>
       <resource>
           <directory>src/main/java</directory>
           <includes>
               <include>**/*.java</include>
               <include>**/*.xml</include>
           </includes>
       </resource>
   </resources>
   

5. In gwt-core/src/main/java, create a Core.gwt.xml that references the modules you'd like to use in all your applications. For example:

   <module>
       <inherits name="com.google.gwt.user.User"/>
       <inherits name="com.google.gwt.i18n.I18N"/>
       <inherits name="com.extjs.gxt.ui.GXT"/>
       <inherits name="pl.rmalinowski.gwt2swf.GWT2SWF"/>
   </module>
   

6. Now the tricky part begins, mostly because of how the gwt-maven plugin currently works. In src/test/java, create a NoOpEntryPoint.gwt.xml that inherits your Core module and defines an EntryPoint.

   <module>
       <inherits name="com.company.app.Core"/>
       <entry-point class="com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint"/>
   </module>
   

7. Create a NoOpEntryPoint.java class in the same directory as NoOpEntryPoint.gwt.xml.

   public class NoOpEntryPoint implements EntryPoint {
       
       public void onModuleLoad() {
           // do nothing
       }
   }
   

8. In any class that extends GWTTestCase (I usually create a parent class for all tests), reference the NoOpEntryPoint in the getModuleName() method.

       @Override
       public String getModuleName() {
           return "com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint";
       }
   

9. Lastly, in the gwt-maven plugin's configuration (in gwt-core/pom.xml), reference the NoOpEntryPoint in <compileTargets>, a non-existent file in <runTarget> and only the "test" goal in the executions.

   <plugin>
       <groupId>com.totsp.gwt</groupId>
       <artifactId>maven-googlewebtoolkit2-plugin</artifactId>
       <version>2.0-beta26</version>
       <configuration>
           <compileTargets>
               <value>com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint</value>
           </compileTargets>
           <runTarget>com.company.app.NoOpEntryPoint/doesntexist.html</runTarget>
           <logLevel>INFO</logLevel>
           <style>OBF</style>
           <noServer>false</noServer>
           <extraJvmArgs>-Xmx512m</extraJvmArgs>
           <gwtVersion>${gwtVersion}</gwtVersion>
           <testFilter>*GwtTestSuite.java</testFilter>
           <testSkip>${skipTests}</testSkip>
       </configuration>
       <executions>
           <execution>
               <goals>
                   <goal>test</goal>
               </goals>
           </execution>
       </executions>
   </plugin>
   

The results of modularizing your application are beneficial (shared code) and detrimental (you have to mvn install gwt-core whenever you make changes in shared classes). If you know of a way to configure the gwt-maven plugin to read sources from both gwt-core and gwt-webapp in hosted mode, I'd love to hear about it.

GWT and AppFuse

Someone recently sent me the following e-mail asking about GWT integration in AppFuse.

I see from your blog that you're spending some time with GWT at the moment. What's your plan, are you going to integrate GWT as another UI Option for AppFuse?

The reason I'm asking is that I actually checked out all of the AppFuse code from the svn repository yesterday, with the intention of starting off adding some GWT stuff in there. My intention was to start by getting a basic Maven archetype together for GWT as an AppFuse UI.

However, if you're planning on doing this yourself in the near future, then there's no point in me starting doing it, I'd have to learn how to write archetype's for a start (not that it looks too difficult) but you'd obviously do it much quicker.

Being a good open-source developer, I moved the discussion to the developer mailing list and replied there:

I know I've been slacking on AppFuse development, but it is ski season and running to work seems to drain my late-night coding ambitions. With that being said, I'm committed to getting AppFuse 2.1 released by JavaOne (hopefully sooner). I figure it's a good week's worth of work and I'll probably have to do it late at night to find the time. That's OK though, I usually really start to enjoy it once I get into it.

Comparing Web Frameworks Book

A publisher recently sent me an e-mail asking some advice. They received a proposal for a book that compares CakePHP, Symfony, Zend, TurboGears, Django, Struts, RoR. Here's a quote from the proposal:

We would like to compare a couple of frameworks and present their advantages and disadvantages in various applications.

Obviously, that kind of manual would be very useful for readers who are starting their 'adventures' with web applications, as it would facilitate their choosing the best framework for their particular application. The manuscript would offer a comparison of the most popular solutions (CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, TurboGears, Django, Struts, Ruby on Rails) and demonstrate the main differences between each.

Therefore, the target audience would mainly be project managers, responsible for deciding on the technologies to be used for in-house projects, as well as less experienced, web application beginners.

Another purpose of the book would be to present 'good practices' in various frameworks, such as code re-factoring, design patterns and application security. From this point of view, it could become a valuable asset for experienced and learner programmers alike.

Since I got a lot of feedback from my tweet on this subject, I figured I'd ask it here.

What do you think of such a book?

Here's my response:

How do PHP books do these days? Of the list of frameworks (CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, TurboGears, Django, Struts, Ruby on Rails), I think there's interest in Django and Rails, but not so much the others. And Struts sucks, so having that as a comparison is obviously going to make it look bad. I wouldn't buy it, but I'm a Java guy that's mostly interested in web frameworks that make developing SOFEA-based applications easier. In my mind, these are Flex and GWT.

The book I'd like to see would cover developing RESTful backends and SOFEA front-ends. RoR, Grails or Django could be used to develop the backend and Flex, GWT and X could be for the front-end. In reality, this is probably a tough book to write b/c things move so fast. If you decide to do it, I'd keep it short and sweet so you can get it to market and update it quickly.

2008 - A Year in Review

In 2005 and 2006, I did "A Year in Review" entries. 2007 was the year I got divorced, which probably motivated me to write a bit less. This year I'm back and ready to spend the next few hours writing, copying/pasting and linking like a madman. Hope you enjoy!

2008 was the year I traveled the world and developed a true passion for skiing. In January, my good friend Jason Miller moved back to Denver after quitting his job at Bear Stearns in NYC. We spent the first weekend in Nebraska working on Cletus's feedlot. The next week, my car stereo got stolen and I wondered if my bad knee would make it through the ski season (the good news is not only did I ski the rest of the season, but my knee healed itself over the summer).

At the end of January, the kids and I hiked to the top of Green Mountain and Don Brown made Maven not suck. Then I wondered if there was room for both Rails and Grails at a company and quickly learned both.

February started fantastically with a 14" Powder Day at Steamboat. I wondered if there is no "best" web framework and reviewed Grails and Rails books. After spending an awesome weekend in Tahoe, I took the kids on The Ski Train and learned more about Selenium at Google.

This brings us to one of my favorite posts of all time. On February 28th, Jack got a bead stuck in his nose. After taking him to the ER and paying $800, we found out magic recipe for bead removal is to "hold one nostril and give him a CPR-type breath/blow into his mouth". The reason I love the post so much is it's solved the problem for other frantic parents when they Google for "bead stuck in nose". Whenever I get a new comment, it always makes me smile.

March started out with a Powder Day at Whistler. I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the weekend with good friends Jarvis and Korn Dog. After returning to Denver, I was allowed to blog about building a UI Frameworks Team at LinkedIn and posted my thoughts on Grails vs. Rails.

In mid-March, I achieved an all-Mac family and traveled to Lake Chelan for my sister's birthday. Shortly after, The AppFuse Primer was released. At the end of the month, I attended TSSJS in Vegas and moderated a Web Framework Smackdown.

In April, the LinkedIn Denver office opened and we all celebrated by attending the Rockie's Home Opener. The ski season came to an end and I wrote a howto for configuring Apache with mod_proxy and SSL on OS X. Then I discovered the JavaOne parties and wrote about running Spring MVC Web Applications in OSGi.

April ended with 82°F and May started with snow. I attended JavaOne (or at least the parties), released AppFuse 2.0.2 and figured out how to do extensionless URLs with the UrlRewriteFilter. The kids and I spent an afternoon in Rocky Mountain National Park and I did some coding in my backyard.

On Memorial Day, I enjoyed a liver-wrenching, Rockies-filled weekend with my sister her girlfriend Mya and Mr. Miller. I also contemplated making AppFuse Struts 2-specific.

June started with some mountain bike riding, planning some excellent vacations and getting a dream machine. I rode the annual trip to Big Head Todd at Red Rocks with Matt and Bruce. I took the kids on their first camping trip for Father's Day and had a blast. It took us several hours to find the campsite and my car kept starting all night long. It's sure to be a family tradition from now on.

The next weekend, I attended the American Craft Beer Fest in Boston. To end the month, I embarked upon Raible Road Trip #12 with Abbie, Jack and my Dad.

In July, the bus project began and I posted pictures of the trip to Montana. This year, I hope to spend the whole month of July at the cabin. I bought an iPhone (one of my best technology-related purchases to date). OSCON was fun but the week after wasn't.

August revealed my favorite birthday present. I didn't blog much the rest of the month, revealing why later.

Jack's Birthday Weekend was an outstandingly fun mixture of old friends and good Colorado beer. In September, I went to see the bus at MotorWorks, Abbie lost her first tooth and co-workers and I performance tested Memcached.

What followed was wonderful. Miller and I headed to Oktoberfest for the Best. Vacation. Ever. We still talk about how much fun we had on that vacation. October finished with the Colorado Software Summit and a hunting trip to the cabin.

November was a crazy month. I got laid off and celebrated Abbie's birthday on the same day. Jack got a mohawk and I traveled coast-to-coast in the same week. To close the month, I announced what's next and headed to Costa Rica.

I had a fantastic time in Costa Rica and was impressed to see Abbie is a blue skier shortly after. I did a Dojo/Comet Research Project for a week and enjoyed the location of my newest client last week. A small adventure turned into a scary adventure and I enjoyed telling my stories to fellow Java Enthusiasts in Portland.

Phew! It's been quite a year. For 2009, I'm still hoping for what I tweeted shortly after Costa Rica. I'd like to visit 3 foreign countries, take 3 months of vacation and spend 1 month in Montana. I have technology goals too, but those aren't nearly as much fun to dream about.

Happy New Year!

AppFuse Light converted to Maven modules, upgraded to Tapestry 5 and Stripes 1.5

This past week, I stayed up a couple of late nights to do some of the AppFuse Light work I wrote about in October. I converted all web frameworks to Maven modules, as well as made them inherit from the appfuse-web project. Below is what the new module structure looks like:

At this point, the project is ready to import into AppFuse's SVN project. Here's a list of other changes I made:

• Modules now depend on AppFuse's backend and allow you to use Hibernate, JPA or iBATIS as the persistence framework. Implementations for Spring JDBC, OJB and JDO have been removed.
• Upgraded to JWebUnit 2.1, which now uses HtmlUnit under the hood and has much better JavaScript support. It also has Selenium support, but I've yet to try it.
• Ajaxified Body integrated into all frameworks. You can easily turn it off by modifying the global.js file.
• Prototype and Scriptaculous loaded from Google's Ajax Libraries CDN.
• Upgraded to Tapestry 5. Mad props to Serge Eby and his tapestry5-appfuse project for showing me how to do this. Serge became a committer on AppFuse recently, so hopefully we'll continue to see great things from the Tapestry 5 support. I really like the clean URLs and minimum configuration required in Tapestry 5. It's testing framework is nice too, but I believe it could be improved.
• Upgraded to Stripes 1.5. This was easy and painless. I'm definitely a fan of Stripes and look forward to reading the Stripes book on my bookshelf.
• Dropped support for: Struts 1.x, WebWork, Spring MVC + Velocity.

If you want to try any of these applications, you can create archetypes using the following commands:

svn co https://appfuse-light.dev.java.net/svn/appfuse-light/trunk appfuse-light
cd appfuse-light/preferred-web-framework
mvn archetype:create-from-project
cd target/generated-sources/archetype
mvn install
cd ~/dev
mvn archetype:generate # The new archetype should show up as an option

Next steps include figuring out a way to flatten the inherited dependencies and plugins so archetype:create-from-project can create truly standalone projects. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Dojo/Comet support in Java Web Frameworks

This week I'm doing a research project for a client. The main purpose of the project is to find out which Java-based web framework works best with Dojo and Comet. Here's the key requirement from the client:

It's all about Comet, we want Comet everywhere we can put it, but we want to isolate the icky bits of fiddling with pages with JavaScript. We're kind of wed to the Dojo implementation of the client-side bit, so we may as well use more of the Dojo widgets for a richer UI. For us, "works best with" needs to pay a certain amount of consideration to "fits naturally with", if you understand what I mean. I know that any framework that lets you spit out raw HTML will let you hand code in your Dojo / Comet, but that's certain to become very tiresome very quickly.

The candidate frameworks they asked me to look at are Wicket and Tapestry 5. They're willing to upgrade to Struts 2 since they're already using Struts 1. However, they don't feel that action-based frameworks naturally lead to rich UIs, so they'd prefer a component-based framework. They're currently using Seam for an administration-type application and feel it's too heavy for their customer-facing application.

Here's what I've found so far in my research. Please let me know if anything is incorrect.

• Tapestry 5 doesn't have Dojo or Comet support (Prototype and Scriptaculous are the baked-in Ajax frameworks).
• Struts 2 has old (version 0.4.3) and somewhat deprecated Dojo support. The developers seem to be in favor of removing it and promoting people hand-code Dojo instead. Struts 2 doesn't have support for Comet.
• Wicket has support for Dojo 1.1 that includes Comet support. This was written by Stefan Fußenegger and posted to the mailing list last month. I e-mailed Stefan and asked him about documentation. His response: "I lost my ambition to document it properly since I didn't receive any feedback on the mailing list. :)"

At this point, it seems that if the client really wants to use Dojo, they should use Wicket, and possibly pay Stefan to document it properly. However, they're willing to consider other options, as long as they have Comet support.

One option I thought of is to use DWR and its Reverse Ajax/Comet support. Another option would be to add better Dojo support to Tapestry 5. However, I don't think this is possible since the Prototype/Scriptaculous code is generated by the framework and would likely require a changes to switch it to Dojo.

Are there any other Java-based web frameworks that support easily creating Dojo widgets and working with Comet? Keith Donald tweeted that Spring MVC has Dojo support. However, I believe it's only for widgets and it still requires you to write JavaScript. If your framework doesn't have Dojo/Comet support, how hard would it be to add it?

Update: I also posted this question on LinkedIn. Make sure and check my question for additional thoughts from folks.

What's Next

It's been three weeks since I joined the realm of the unemployed. Fortunately, I didn't stay unemployed for long. In fact, after writing the aforementioned post, I received 5 offers the next day. Of the opportunities I received, the most interesting ones were those from companies interested in hiring the whole team. Not only that, but LinkedIn hired me back as a contractor through the end of the year. The goal of the LinkedIn contract: finish up projects that my team had started in the previous months.

At the end of the first week after the LinkedIn layoffs, we all had individual opportunities, but we also had two team opportunities. The following week (last week), I flew to NYC to meet with one potential client while the other potential client flew to Denver to meet with the rest of the team. After flying to NYC, I traveled to Mountain View to do some on-site work at LinkedIn. At the end of the week, it seemed like most of the remaining tasks at LinkedIn could be done by someone else. I told them I thought it was best that I move onto other things, while staying available for support questions. On the way to the airport, I spoke with both our team opportunities. Following those conversations, I was very pumped about both projects and confident about pending offers. You can imagine my disappointment when my flight was delayed for 5 hours.

After a fun weekend with Abbie, Jack and friends, I woke up Monday morning without a job and it felt great. However, things changed quickly. Monday morning many opportunities landed in my inbox: a 3-day gig this week (helping write open-source training), a 1-week gig in December (evaluating how well Tapestry 5, Wicket and Struts 2 integrate with Dojo/Comet for a client in Europe), a 1-week training gig in Europe next year and a 3-month gig for the whole team. I accepted all these opportunities and am very happy I'll get to work with Jimbo, Country and Scotty again next year. The 3-month gig should be a lot of fun. We're helping build a SOFEA-based architecture that leverages appropriate client technologies (to be determined) to build a kick-ass web application. I look forward to talking about the technologies we use and things we learn along the way.

So the good news is I've entered The Golden Period. The Golden Period is when you don't have a job, but you do have a start date. Unemployment is absolutely blissful during this time. The Golden Period exists a couple times for me over the next 6 weeks.

I'll be traveling to Costa Rica tomorrow for a best friend's wedding. I'm leaving both my laptop and my iPhone at home. Next week, I'll be loving life with my parents in Costa Rica and Panama. The following week, I'll be working on AppFuse all week and hope to make great progress on developing 2.1. Then I have the 1-week Web Framework Analysis gig, followed by 2 weeks of vacation in Oregon. My Golden Period begins this afternoon (for 3 weeks) and happens again over Christmas (for 2 weeks).

Yeah, life is good. Damn good.