Raible Designs

Spring Workshops from Virtuas

I'm pleased to announce that my company, Virtuas, has decided to start offering public workshops for many prominent open source projects. These include Spring, Geronimo, Tomcat, Hibernate and JSF/MyFaces.

I'll be teaching the first Spring course in Denver February 21st - 24th, followed by one in Boston in mid-March. It should be a fun class, especially since I'm adding a bunch of stuff regarding Spring 2.0. Since I know you're going to ask the price -- and it's not posted on virtuas.com -- it's $2,495 per person for 1-4 people from the same company/group/etc., $1,995 per person for five or more people.

In other Virtuas news, we've recently signed partnership agreements with IBM and Covalent. We also re-worked our site with Andreas Viklund's "andreas08" theme from Open Source Web Design. Thanks to the power of Drupal, all we had to do to change the whole site was modify one PHP template and one CSS file. Thanks to both Andreas and Drupal for vastly simplifying our new look-n-feel.

Update: It looks like Andreas's theme has been made into a Drupal theme. Nice.

MacBook Pro

Thanks Steve. Much appreciated.

Purchased. Fully-loaded. Ships in February.

Steve, PLEASE announce Intel PowerBooks

I totally agree with Dion. For the love of God, pppplllllleeeeeeeaaaaaaasssssseeeee announce Intel-based ass-kicking PowerBooks tomorrow!! I love my PowerBook, but I hate the speed. It's extremely frustrating developing in Java on it, especially when I spend 60% of my time on a dual-core AMD 64. If Apple doesn't announce new PowerBooks tomorrow, it's likely I'll buy a Ferrari instead.

OpenSuse 10.0 vs. Ubuntu 5.10

Ever since I got a new HP Pavilion, I've been planning what's next for my Dell Dimension 8300. I decided it's probably best to retire my somewhat hosed Fedora Core 3 box (Dimension 8100) and replace it with a new Linux server. After talking with a good friend, I decided to go with OpenSuse 10.0 or Ubuntu 5.10. Steve was a good enough friend to burn me DVDs of both. Yesterday, I bought a new 160GB hard drive and last night I tried to install Ubuntu. I went w/ Ubuntu b/c Steve tried them both and said he liked Ubuntu a lot better. I've never used Ubuntu, and I have used Suse a fair bit - so I figured I'd try something new.

When I started installing Ubuntu last night, I figured it'd be a breeze. I have a DVI KVM Switch hooked up to a Logitech cordless keyboard/mouse, and Ubuntu immediately recognized them both. However, at 44%, it failed to install gstreamer0.8-jpeg and the installation bailed out. I was able to login to the desktop and (seemingly) get stuff working, but I'm always a bit leary about a failure in the middle of an OS install. After an hour of futzing with it, I tried again and got the same error. Around 1 a.m., I said "screw this" and threw in the Suse DVD.

I had the same good results with Suse, where my keyboard and mouse were recognized. However, when I got prompted for the root password, my keyboard quit working and I was up shit creek. I started the re-install process before going to bed at 2 and picked it up again this afternoon - after a beautiful day of skiing at Copper. I got almost everything working on Suse this afternoon, and just as I was about to call things good - the keyboard problem came back. Pretty disappointing since I'd just gotten my Apple Cinema Display to work.

As I speak, I'm trying Ubuntu again, without the KVM switch. I suspect there's probably a piece of hardware I have that's causing the failure, so hopefully unplugging things will solve the problem. If I don't get it figured out in the next hour or two, I'll probably just go with Suse, setup VNC - and get a wired keyboard for when I need direct access.

24 hours later: It's interesting to see that almost the commentors on this post are recommending Ubuntu. After posting this, and receiving a comment from Brett, I tried the Ubuntu Live DVD. What I found was that Ubuntu recognized my cinema display, but it entered into a non-stop flickering loop that I couldn't solve. Therefore, I threw in the Suse DVD and tried again. This time, Suse recognized everything flawlessly (including my HP OfficeJet G85). So I'm sticking with Suse - mainly because it seems to recognize my cinema display, printer and DVI KVM switch the best. With apt-get working on Suse, it's been a breeze to get everything setup.

The Last Day

Today is my last day working for Starz on their Vongo project. While it's been a fun project, it's been painful commuting to South Denver everyday. I'm pretty pumped to start riding my bike downtown again. I rode downtown on Monday to help Max with some Drupal stuff and quickly realized the best part of Virtuas is riding my bike to work. Of course, there's many other good things about it, but that's #1 on my list.

Now is probably a good time to reminisce on other last days: in 2004 and 2003. I like working for Virtuas - where the last day at a client doesn't mean I have to find a new gig right away.

Vongo

It's not everyday that the project you've been working on gets announced all over the news (even locally!).

It's been a fun project to work on - with some pretty cool technology powering it all.

2005 - A Year in Review

2005 was quite a year for me. I found my dream job, after contemplating what's next in my career only a few months earlier. I attended TheServerSide Symposium in March and created some great memories with James Goodwill. There's nothing like losing all your money and then winning it all back at 6 in the mornin'.

Other March highlights include:

• Geert Bevin saying Laszlo is a waste of time, then rescinded his statement two weeks later.
• Heading to Microsoft for the Competitive Influentials Summit.
• Getting my nuts cut off.

April was a fun month, and started off with a me heading to work for Microsoft. The joke worked so well it was picked up by news.com. DU repeated as NCAA Champions (again). The MySQL Conference and wine-tasting with Julie (for our 5th anniversary) rounded out the month.

May was a whirlwind month, where I headed to Norway after barely renewing my expired passport on time. My PowerBook died on the way over, but I still had a great time. I was featured on TheServerSide and started planning AppFuse 2.0.

The summer flew by: I got biled by Hani, toured with the "Bomb Squad" at JavaOne, drove through Yellowstone, bought a new bike, learned more about Ruby and Rails at OSCON (and learned how much fun a smackdown can be), and watched Jack turn 1.

Then things got busy: I had a great time at Java in Action, started The Bus Project, and enjoyed the beauty of Keystone with Bender and Snyder at the Colorado Software Summit.

To round out the year, I traveled and attended conferences like I was possessed (New Jersey, NFJS, San Francisco and Florida). Abbie turned 3, Roller 2.0 was released and the WebWork joined Struts after a multi-year rivalry.

Phew, it's been quite a year folks. Here's to 2006 being even better! My goals for the year? Happiness, health and more car bombs with family and friends.

Improving JSF in AppFuse

I've noticed the number of AppFuse users using JSF starting to pick up lately. This is probably mostly because Sanjiv Jivan and Thomas Gaudin (both committers) have started to use it on their projects. Thomas has been nice enough to write a couple of interesting blog entries on JSF and AppFuse. Click on the links below to read more.

• Non English AppFuse applications with JSF
• ADF faces integration in AppFuse

The Ajax Experience

The Ajax Experience looks like it's going to be an excellent show.

This is a show I'd love to attend. However, it ends the day before Mother's Day - WTF is up with that?! For those of us who happen to be family men and are planning on attending JavaOne, this sucks. If I want to attend The Ajax Experience, I'd have to fly back on Sunday and then fly back to San Fran on Monday for JavaOne. Booo hisss. Looks like I'll be missing this show.

RE: Oracle donates ADF Faces to Apache MyFaces

I read the news initially on the AMIS Technology blog, which points to the original news-breaker on the IT-eye Weblog. This is huge for the JSF community IMO. The main compelling feature behind component-based frameworks is components. Without components, there's not much point in them.

By christmas a website and mailing list will be available for the incubator project. You will also be able to download the source code. By New Year a subversion repository should be available with the source code. And the intention is to move out of incubator by JavaOne 2006, which I think is in May.

So why is Oracle doing this? Well it's obvious that Java needs to have a good component based framework to compete with .NET. And Oracle believes that JSF can be this Framework, but a good implementation is needed, which is what ADF Faces provides.

What does ADF Faces, or better Apache Faces Cherokee contain? More than 100 components, an Html AJAX renderkit (but it doesn't use HttpXmlRequest, but iframes), a dialog framework, personalization, skinning, and a lot more.

I wonder if Oracle has a solution for the "everything is a post" problem?

JSF is cool, and easy to be productive in, but so is Tapestry, WebWork and Spring MVC. I find it somewhat ironic that the Struts committers turned down Shale as Struts 2.0, but they voted in WebWork.

I think component-based frameworks might be the way of the future. However, after playing with OpenLaszlo for the past few weeks - I can't help but think that this is what component-based frameworks should be. Many components, easy to use, and the output is a rich-client out-of-the-box. In addition to the Flash output they have now, I've heard rumblings that OpenLaszlo may support other outputs in the future (i.e. XHTML/Ajax).

It's pretty cool to see continued excitement and innovation in Java. Competition is good, and will only make each of these frameworks stronger and easier to use.